INTRODUCTION

THE LOVE RELIGION, WILD SOULBOOKS, AND WHAT IS

The story of Rumi’s life is well known. Born in the early thirteenth century into a lineage of scholars and mystics in Balkh (then at the eastern edge of the Persian empire, now in northern Afghanistan), he left as a boy with his family just ahead of the advancing armies of Genghis Khan. After several years of traveling they settled in Konya (south-central Turkey), where Rumi became the leader, after his father Bahauddin’s death, of a dervish learning community. His life and consciousness changed radically after the meeting in 1244 with his teacher and friend, Shams Tabriz, a wandering meditator of fiery force and originality. The inner work that Shams did with Rumi and Rumi with Shams produced the poetry. It springs from their friendship.

The words that came so spontaneously carry a broad range of religious awareness: the meditative silence and no-mind of Zen, the open heart and compassion of Jesus, the stern discipline of Muhammad, the convivial humor of Taoists, the crazy wisdom and bright intelligence of the Jewish Hassidic masters. Rumi is a planetary poet, loved the world over for the grandeur of his surrender and for the freedom and grace of his poetry. He was nurtured within the Islamic tradition, the Persian language, and a long line of Sufis, but it is his connection with Shams of Tabriz that lets his work transcend definition and doctrine. The poetry feels as though it belongs to all. When he died in 1273, members of every religion came to the funeral. Wherever you stand, his words deepen your connection to the mystery of being alive.

The wide use of Rumi texts in multicultural gatherings, that vivid and characterizing feature of our landscape, has roots, I believe, in the continuous human search for true identity, for soul. Whatever the soul is, it does get fed by practices that honor its presence. Such practices might include walking for a lot of people in these sedentary times, and also the habit of reading a wild soulbook. Those volumes vary with each taste and need. Montaigne’s Essays for Emerson, Rousseau for Hazlitt, Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Sketches for Hemingway, Chekhov for Raymond Carver. Dickens for Faulkner. Taoist poetry for Robert Bly. G. K. Chesterton for Andrew Dick. Benedetto Croce for Rabindranath Tagore. Nietzsche for Edwin Muir, Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman for John Seawright. D. H. Lawrence’s poetry for Galway Kinnell, P. G. Wodehouse for Robert West, Goethe’s Letters to Eckermann for my sister Betsy (Elizabeth Cox), Henri Nouwen for my brother Herb, Meister Eckhart for James Wright, Lord Jim for Annie Dillard, Thornton Wilder for Ed Hicks, Ruskin and Crabb Robinson for Mary Oliver, Ibn Arabi for Ed Hirsch. Mark’s Gospel and Hardy’s poetry for Donald Hall. Euripides for C. S. Lewis, Hamlet and King Lear for Ellen Williams. For Elizabeth Bishop it was a rocklike, very dull second volume of a study on some industrial technique, for Marianne Moore, a Saturday morning lecture on Java. I wonder what would be a wild soulbook for Harry Crews. James Agee? For me, since 1976, I have felt the bright wind coming from Rumi. The Shams and The Masnavi.¹

I devised a soulbook practice for myself that eventually became this Rumi work and play. After a day of teaching sophomore literature at a university—this was in September 1976—I would walk to the Bluebird Restaurant, have some hot tea, mull an oceanic page or two of Arberry’s translations, and rephrase a section into a free-verse poem with a title. I was trying to reenter the trance of the poem and get the feel of its creative freedom. Rumi has not been my only soulbook these last thirty years. There’s also García Márquez, Colin Wilson, Cormac McCarthy, Ryokan, Edwin Muir, Henry Miller, James Dickey, Gary Snyder, Whitman, and Charlie Smith’s poetry. This year it is bird callings, and I refuse to explain.

Roy Ashley taught us this Emily Dickinson in high school.

Some keep the Sabbath going to Church—

I keep it, staying at Home—

With a Bobolink for a Chorister—

And an Orchard, for a Dome.

Some keep the Sabbath in Surplice—

I, just wear my Wings—

And instead of tolling the bell, for Church,

Our little Sexton—sings.

God preaches, a noted Clergyman—

And the sermon is never long,

So instead of getting to Heaven, at last—

I’m going, all along.

Roy’s voice had the conviction of Emily’s truth because he lived it, keeping not only the Sabbath but every late afternoon in a sacred solitude, walking and bird-whistling his spontaneous compositions, going along as he did. I grew up on the campus of a boys’ boarding school where my father was headmaster. Mr. Ashley lived in an apartment near ours and would stroll his whistling past our screen porch. Unselfconscious, virtuoso, operatic, impersonal, poignant—I have never heard anything like that trilling. People used to whistle in public more than they do now. Roy Ashley seemed not to claim his music, and only rarely did anyone speak of it, never to interrupt. That strange, uncommon human birdsong was a teaching whole unto itself. Thomas Mann was his soulbook genius, I think: The Magic Mountain and Buddenbrooks.

The same year that I first heard Emily’s call to churchlessness, 1952, I heard another call too. The Billy Graham Crusade came to town and I went up front for the invitation. Under the sweet counsel of a man named Chuck Bovee, I began a program of memorizing Bible verses, two hundred and twenty-seven of them, all from the King James. It was a profound love for a soulbook, the New Testament. Les Misérables and The Return of the Native were other soulbooks for me then, at fifteen. I carried whatever group of twenty-five New Testament verses I was working on in a black leather packet in my back pocket. One day when I was scuffling with my archrival, Billy D. Pettway, the verse wallet fell to the ground. He picked it up. What’s this? Rubbers? There was no explanation for the weird spirit-longing leap I had taken. “Bible verses I’m memorizing,” said I in dismay.

Now I have made a pack of poetry lines for my teenage granddaughter Briny. Shakespeare, Blake, Dickinson, Mary Oliver, Keats, Galway Kinnell, Mark Twain. For this open-air sanctuary that a lot of us live in, without buildings, or doctrine, or clergy, without silsila (lineage), or hierarchy, in an experiment to live not so much without religion as in friendship with all three hundred of them, and all literatures too. It is a brave try for openness and fresh inspiration.²

It is what sent Whitman out walking around Brooklyn. His mother said, He goes out and he comes back in; that’s all he does. It is what prompted Thoreau’s rambling retreat to Walden Pond. It is Huck floating on the river at night. Melville looks out his study window in the Berkshires and writes the ocean of Moby Dick. Jake Barnes in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises slips into an old Spanish church to listen to his thoughts. Wallace Stevens speaks from inside the intensest rendezvous, where God and the imagination are one. Joseph Campbell follows his bliss, researching myth and symbol in the New York Public Library. Gary Snyder works on an ax handle in the high Sierra. Annie Dillard stares down into Tinker Creek. REM’s Michael Stipe stands on stage, Losing my religion. Iris DeMent suggests that we Let the mystery be. All are participating in this global amateur production. We are lucky to have so many luminous figures in this country, but this lineage is not American. It comes down through such varied innumerable strands that it cannot be called a lineage at all.

The records of wandering kept by Basho, Cervantes, Homer, and Allan Ginsberg. Mary Oliver’s faithful early morning walks with a rainproof surveyor’s notebook in her hip pocket. John Muir and Audubon. Anyone who heads out to see what happens, just to enjoy the trip. Needn’t go far, needn’t leave town. Rumi says that merely being in a body and sentient is a state of pure rapture. Form is ecstatic. Those who know that are the ones I’m talking about, and to. Those photographers who love wilderness and the depths of a human face. The radiant noticing of animals that shows in the cave drawings. It comes through Van Gogh and Cezanne, the way they saw splendor transpiring through what appears. Dutch light. Through Blake. All religions are one, saith Willy, and energy is eternal delight. Hopkins. It comes through south India and the Sufis. Indigenous rock art, Tibet. Hieronymous Bosch and Brueghel, Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu. Bodhidharma, Rinzai, and that homely flower Mahakashyap was handed by his friend Gautama. That theology-flower of suchness might be a logo for it. No, no names. No flag. Dreamtime drawings. Chekhov’s holy chuckle, Dostoyevsky’s vivid seekers. The great Greeks and their love of impossible human conversation. Socrates and Plato are saints in this tradition. Saint Francis and my grandson Tuck, too, he will be surprised to know. All children. Gurdjieff. Ramakrishna. Camus and Beckett. Plotinus. Nietzsche prancing naked. And watch as it widens out so beautifully in Galway Kinnell’s “Prayer”:

Whatever happens. Whatever

what is is is what

I want. Only that. But that.

It is joyfully scientific, this pared-down, vast, three-ises-in-a-row petition of Galway’s. The world is so amazingly interesting, I want to be completely here for its moment. That longing is the truth I try to follow, rather than a religion’s iconography. Watch an astronomer or a molecular biologist at work, an estuarist opening the net he has pulled up out of Doboy Sound. They glow as the facts of the world surface. I have found in my experience that good scientists and good mystics are natural friends, good carpenters too. Chefs and surgeons, historians, athletes, all so full of wonder, lovingly careful, and living right at the point of contact, the nailhead of attention and spontaneity.

Saint Teresa stirring the soup, Dan Patterson receiving Sister Miriam’s Shaker gift song. Einstein said that science has totally failed to demystify the universe, now that matter does not exist anymore. Sticks and stones are both made of energy, like love and language. Eddington says the universe is less like a thing than it is like a thought.

If this scruffy, thoughtful, ecstatic crowd needs a name, call them the DUMs, the Disreputable Unaffiliated Mystics, though most are not at all disreputable, and many are devoutly affiliated. Vitalists. Advocates of a perennial philosophy. Pan-somethings or other. Whatever you dub these bright beings, they recognize one another across centuries and cultures. Best not to call them anything. Someone might try to organize them and ruin the fun. The broad interest now in the boundary-dissolving poetry of Rumi is evidence of health in this rebellious, but always kind, impulse.

If blasphemy is possible in this experiment to know and live what is, perhaps it is in whatever insults the soul. Whitman tells us to dismiss such things. But what are those insults? Some come from within. Boredom, cruelty, a cold unresponsiveness, a self-absorbed shyness, depression, addiction. Some from without. War by concept, the insane greed of empire, marketing sterilization and bourgeois dumbing-down. Does the exclusivity of the Abrahamic religious doctrines qualify? The ONLY begotten, the CHOSEN people, the LAST prophet. I would say yes, they do, agreeing with the Sufi Sarmad, who refused to recite the part of the Islamic creed that held that there was but one messenger, one book, one revelation (theirs, of course). Sarmad felt that the whole of creation was sacred, and he sensed that there had been, and will be, many valid ways of acknowledging mystery. His beheaded head died saying that. The exclusive-doctrine people got him.

So whatever keeps the soul from moving along (motion and shapeshifting are great nourishers of soul), whatever keeps it from traveling, from expanding and deepening in love, and living the truth of expressing that, those are the “insults” we need to be alert for.

A Roy Ashley story from further back, 1947. Tony Heywood and I are ten, with BB guns. We decide one morning to stalk and kill something, anything really. A big blue jay. The BB guns are so weak, we could probably have thrown a BB to more effect. We stalk and shoot and chase his blue beleaguered noisy self all around that hill’s trees, until Mr. Ashley sees what we are up to, comes down to the clearing behind the baseball backstop, and puts a stern and sudden end to our stupid cruelty. I still feel the sting of that remorse as we came back to our normal tenderheartedness after such forgetting. The present Dalai Lama says, Kindness is my religion. Whatever the soul is, it truly does love kindness where it finds it, in text or tree or teacher. So say soul is a friend, a weather and a master, the deep being within each that can somehow be met, talked with, lived and fallen into as we let go the mind, or find a soulbook to flee with into its wide-open companionable space. Reading is flight school, Himalayan cave, and possibly a meeting with an unimaginable teacher and friend like Shams Tabriz. That is a lot to claim for reading. It might be just as true to say that reading is a way of avoiding that deepening. But I would rather anticipate that this three-inch persimmon seedling in the bucket of potting soil behind my house will eventually grow to eighty feet. Some have. Jelaluddin Chelabi, head of the Mevlevi order of dervishes (the ones descended from Rumi), once asked me, What religion are you? I gave him the arms-open, palms-up who-knows gesture. Good, he said. Love is the religion, and the universe is the book.

Here is how Ibn Arabi speaks of the all-inclusive, no-dogma, no-structure way. The light at the end of this poem is both subject and subjectivity.

The Love Religion

The inner space inside

that we call the heart

has become many different

living scenes and stories.

A pasture for sleek gazelles,

a monastery for Christian monks,

a temple with Shiva dancing,

a kaaba for pilgrimage.

The tablets of Moses are there,

the Qur’an, the Vedas,

the sutras, and the gospels.

Love is the religion in me.

Whichever way love’s camel goes,

that way becomes my faith,

the source of beauty, and a

light of sacredness over everything.

NOTES

The A. J. Arberry translations were first: Mystical Poems of Rumi (Persian Heritage Series No. 3, University of Chicago Press, 1968) and Mystical Poems of Rumi (Persian Heritage Series No. 23, Westview Press, Boulder, CO, 1979). Then the three volumes of Reynold Nicholson’s translation of The Masnavi with their Commentaries: The Mathnawi of Jalalu’ddin Rum (Luzac, London, 1925–40). Also the work of Nevit Ergin and M. G. Gupta, and of course, the collaboration with John Moyne. See the References headnote.

I am not opposed to churches. There is a deep human value in the rituals they provide. I love to enter the sacred space of a church, and also that of a mosque, a synagogue, a Hindu temple, the space described by standing stones, and the high mountain retreats of Bhutan. The singing and the friendships found in these communities can be very beautiful. It is just that the turf-squabbling of the organized religions has become hazardous to the health of a wider community and maybe to that of the planet itself.

JANUARY

JANUARY 1

A Just-Finishing Candle

A candle is made to become entirely flame.

In that annihilating moment

it has no shadow.

It is nothing but a tongue of light

describing a refuge.

Look at this

just-finishing candle stub

as someone who is finally safe

from virtue and vice,

the pride and the

shame we claim from those.

JANUARY 2

A Single Brushstroke Down

Light dawns, and any talk of proof

resembles a blind man’s cane at sunrise.

Remember the passage,

We are with you wherever you are.

Come back to that.

When did we ever leave it?

No matter we’re in a prison of forgetting

or enjoying the banquet of wisdom,

we are always inside presence.

Drunkenly asleep, tenderly awake,

clouded with grief, laughing like lightning,

angry at war, quiet with gratitude, we are nothing

in this many-mooded world of weather

but a single brushstroke down,

speaking of presence.

*The word Allah in Arabic begins with a strong downward mark.

JANUARY 3

Children Running Through

I used to be shy.

You made me sing.

I used to refuse things at table.

Now I shout for more wine.

In somber dignity, I used to sit

on my mat and pray.

Now children run through

and make faces at me.

JANUARY 4

The Elegance of the Ermine

Midnight, and a messenger comes from a prayer niche,

someone as quiet as moonlight,

yet with a torch that burns our sleeping.

A king knocks on the doorkeeper’s door

and laughing, leads everyone out to a table.

Our lips tremble at the cup, with the same trembling

as a drop of mercury.

The gentleness of the host is the same

as that that made the elegance of the ermine.

The dry and wet of a love affair,

those tears are identical to the taking in

and giving away of a waterwheel’s turning.

The keys that open all gates

are strapped to love’s chest.

When a bird is completely broken and still,

it gets removed from the snare.

This list of rude likenesses

does not come near saying

what happens in our lives.

JANUARY 5

Birdwings

Your grief for what you’ve lost lifts a mirror

up to where you’re bravely working.

Expecting the worst, you look, and instead,

here’s the joyful face you’ve been wanting to see.

Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes.

If it were always a fist or always stretched open,

you would be paralyzed.

Your deepest presence

is in every small contracting and expanding,

the two as beautifully balanced and coordinate

as birdwings.

JANUARY 6

Sometimes I Do

In your light I learn how to love.

In your beauty, how to make poems.

You dance inside my chest,

where no one sees you,

but sometimes I do,

and that light becomes this art.

JANUARY 7

Don’t Let Your Throat Tighten

Don’t let your throat tighten

with fear. Take sips of breath

all day and night, before death

closes your mouth.

JANUARY 8

There Is Something in Us

Imagine a man selling his donkey

to be with Jesus.

Now imagine him selling Jesus

to get a ride on a donkey.

This does happen.

Jesus can transform a drunk into gold.

If the drunk is already golden,

he can be changed to pure diamond.

If already that, he can become the circling

planets, Jupiter, Venus, the moon.

Never think that you are worthless.

God has paid an enormous amount for you,

and the gifts keep arriving.

There is something in us

that has nothing to do with night and day,

grapes that never saw a vineyard.

WE ARE ALL RETURNING

says the Qur’an. Enjoy Shams,

or if you cannot do that, at least

consider what honest people tell you.

JANUARY 9

Gnats Inside the Wind

Some gnats come from the grass to speak with Solomon.

O Solomon, you are the champion of the oppressed.

You give justice to the little guys, and they don’t get

any littler than us. We are tiny metaphors

for frailty. Can you defend us?

Who has mistreated you?

Our complaint is against the wind.

Well, says Solomon, you have pretty voices,

you gnats, but remember, a judge cannot listen

to just one side. I must hear both litigants.

Of course, agree the gnats.

Summon the East Wind, calls out Solomon,

and the wind arrives almost immediately.

What happened to the gnat plaintiffs? Gone.

Such is the way of every seeker who comes to complain

at the High Court. When the presence of God arrives,

where are the seekers? First there’s dying,

then union, like gnats inside the wind.

JANUARY 10

A Piece of Wood

I reach for a piece of wood. It turns into a lute.

I do some meanness. It turns out helpful.

I say one must not travel during the holy month.

Then I start out, and wonderful things happen.

JANUARY 11

Backpain

Muhammad went to visit a sick friend.

Such kindness brings more kindness,

and there is no knowing the proliferation from there.

The man was about to die.

Muhammad put his face close and kissed him.

His friend began to revive.

Muhammad’s visit re-created him.

He began to feel grateful for an illness

that brought such light.

And also for the backpain

that wakes him in the night.

No need to snore away like a buffalo

when this wonder is walking the world.

There are values in pain that are difficult

to see without the presence of a guest.

Don’t complain about autumn.

Walk with grief like a good friend.

Listen to what he says.

Sometimes the cold and dark of a cave

give the opening we most want.

JANUARY 12

The Night Ocean

We are the the night ocean filled

with glints of light. We are the space

between the fish and the moon,

while we sit here together.

JANUARY 13

The Gift of Water

Someone who does not know the Tigris River exists

brings the caliph who lives near the river

a jar of fresh water. The caliph accepts, thanks him,

and gives in return a jar filled with gold coins.

Since this man has come through the desert,

he should return by water. Taken out by another door,

the man steps into a waiting boat and sees

the wide freshwater of the Tigris. He bows his head,

What wonderful kindness that he took my gift.

Every object and being in the universe is a jar

overfilled with wisdom and beauty, a drop of the Tigris

that cannot be contained by any skin. Every jarful

spills and makes the earth more shining,

as though covered in satin.

If the man had seen even a tributary of the great river,

he would not have brought the innocence of his gift.

Those that stay and live by the Tigris grow so ecstatic

that they throw rocks at the jugs, and the jugs

become perfect. They shatter. The pieces dance,

and water…Do you see?

Neither jar nor water nor stone, nothing.

You knock at the door of reality, shake

your thought-wings, loosen your shoulders, and open.

JANUARY 14

The Mill

The heart is a wheatgrain. We are the mill

where this body is a millstone

and thought, the moving river.

The body asks the river why it runs on so.

The river says, Ask the miller who made

the millrace that directs my falling

that turns your stone.

The miller says, You that love bread,

if this turning were not happening,

what would you dip in your broth?

So a lot of questioning goes on

around the milling of wheat,

but what really is this breadmaking work?

Now let silence ask

about wheat and the river,

about the miller and the stone

and the taste of bread dipped in soup,

and this listening we do at the mill.

*The mill is one of Rumi’s images for the process whereby individual grains get crushed to make something less separate, more communally useful (bread). Thought (the riverwater) and the body (the millstone) are part of this work, as are the miller (creative intelligence) and the customer (desire), who wants a piece of bread for his soup.

JANUARY 15

Bu’l-Hasan and the Snow

After Bestami died, it happened as he said

that Bu’l-Hasan became the sheikh for his community.

Every day Bu’l-Hasan would go to Bestami’s tomb

to receive instruction. He had been told to do this

in a dream by Bestami himself.

Every dawn he goes and stands

facing the tomb until midmorning.

Either the spirit of Bestami comes and talks to him

or in silence the questions he has are answered.

One day a deep snow has fallen overnight.

The graves are indistinguishable.

Bu’l-Hasan feels lost.

Then he hears his sheikh’s voice.

The world is made of snow.

It falls and melts and falls again.

Do not be concerned with the snow.

Come toward the sound of my voice.

Move always in this direction.

From that day Bu’l-Hasan began to experience

the enlightened state

he had only heard and read about before.

JANUARY 16

Let the Beauty We Love

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty

and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study

and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.

There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

JANUARY 17

Love Moves Away

Pale sunlight,

pale the wall.

Love moves away.

The light changes.

I need more grace

than I thought.

JANUARY 18

The Old Woman and the Falcon

When you give a noble falcon

to a fussy old woman who knows nothing of falconry,

she will clip its wings short, for its own good.

Young man, where has your mother been

that your toenails have gotten this long?

Those talons are how the falcon hunts its food.

The old woman fixes him tutmaj, dumpling stew.

He won’t touch it. Too good to eat my tutmaj, huh?

She ladles some broth and holds it to his beak.

Her anger builds, and suddenly she pours

the ladle of hot soup over his head.

Tears come from those beautiful falcon eyes.

He remembers his former life, the king’s love-whistle,

the great circling over the ocean,

the distances that condense so quickly to a point.

Falcon tears are food for a true human being,

perfume for Gabriel.

Your soul is the king’s falcon,

who says, This old woman’s rage

does not touch my glory or my discipline.

JANUARY 19

Hallaj

Hallaj said what he said and went to the origin

through the hole in the scaffold.

I cut a cap’s worth of cloth from his robe,

and it swamped over me from head to foot.

Years ago, I broke a bunch of roses

from the top of his wall. A thorn from that

is still in my palm, working deeper.

A person comes to him naked. It’s cold.

There’s a fur coat floating in the river.

Jump in and get it, he says.

You dive in. You reach for the coat.

It reaches for you.

It’s a live bear that has fallen in upstream,

drifting with the current.

How long does it take? Hallaj yells from the bank.

Don’t wait, you answer. This coat

has decided to wear me home.

A little part of a story, a hint.

Do you need long sermons on Hallaj?

JANUARY 20

The Sunrise Ruby

In the early morning hour,

just before dawn, lover and beloved wake

and take a drink of water.

She asks, Do you love me or yourself more?

Really, tell the absolute truth.

He says, There is nothing left of me.

I am like a ruby held up to the sunrise.

Is it still a stone, or a world

made of redness? It has no resistance

to sunlight. The ruby and the sunrise are one.

Be courageous and discipline yourself.

Work. Keep digging your well.

Don’t think about getting off from work.

Submit to a daily practice.

Your loyalty to that is a ring on the door.

Keep knocking, and the joy inside

will eventually open a window

and look out to see who’s there.

JANUARY 21

A Night Full of Talking

A night full of talking that hurts,

my worst held-back secrets. Everything

has to do with loving and not loving.

This night will pass.

Then we have work to do.

JANUARY 22

The Price of Kissing

I would love to kiss you.

The price of kissing is your life.

Now my loving is running toward my life shouting,

What a bargain, let’s buy it.

JANUARY 23

Farther and Farther from Zero

Suddenly, I fall from the pavilion

into a place where I see the ugliness,

hypocrisy, rouge on a sunken face,

a thorn lodged in a kidney, the blind crone

holding a laurel wreath for the winner,

her black ribbons in shreds,

her eyes dark wth purple,

a gold anklet on her shriveled leg.

The puppet show looks charming,

but go behind the screen and see who runs it.

Wash your hands and face of this charade.

Anyone who wants these prizes

flares up quickly like a wood chip.

There is one who can help,

who turns the wheel from nonexistence

to a sweet-breathing emptiness.

Words are ways we add up breath,

counting stress and syllable

with our exacting musical knack

that takes us farther and farther from zero.

JANUARY 24

The Visions of Daquqi (1)

Husam, tell about the visions of Daquqi,

who said, I have traveled east and west

not knowing which way I was going,

following the moon, lost inside God.

Someone asked, Why do you go barefooted

over the stones and thorns.

What, he answered. What.

A bewildered lover does not walk on feet.

He or she walks on love. There are no “long”

or “short” trips for those. No time.

The body learned from spirit how to travel.

A saint’s body moves in the unconditioned way,

though it seems to be in conditionedness.

Daquqi said, One day I was going along

looking to see in people the shining of the Friend.

I came to the shore at twilight and saw

seven candles. I hurried along the beach

toward them. I was amazed. My amazement was amazed.

Waves of bewilderment broke over my head.

JANUARY 25

The Visions of Daquqi (2)

What are those candles that no one seems to see?

In the presence of such lights

people were looking for lamps to buy.

Then the seven became one,

in the middle of the sky’s rim.

Then that fanned out to seven again.

There were connections between the candles

that cannot be said. I saw, but I cannot say.

They became seven men and then seven trees,

so dense with leaves and fruit no limbs were visible.

Flashes of light

spurted from each fruit like juice.

And most marvelous of all was that hundreds

of thousands of people were passing beside the trees,

risking their lives, sacrificing everything,

to find some scrap of shade. No one saw

the trees with their tremendous shade.

JANUARY 26

The Visions of Daquqi (3)

The caravans had no food, yet food was dropping

all about them. If someone had said

Look, over here, they would have thought him insane.

How can this happen. Am I dreaming?

I walk up to the trees. I eat the fruit.

I may as well believe.

Then the seven trees become one and then seven again.

At every second they are both one and seven.

Then they are seven men seated in meditation

for the sake of the one reality.

I come closer and wave. They call,

O Daquqi, the glory and the crown.

How do they know my name?

They have never seen me until now.

Immediately they know my thought

and smile at each other.

Honored one, is this still hidden from you?

How can anything be hidden from one so dissolved in God?

I think inwardly, If this is the spirit-reality,

how is it we are speaking words and saying names?

JANUARY 27

The Visions of Daquqi (4)

One of the seven answers, Names, sometimes

the names slip away,

but it is not forgetfulness.

It is our being so absorbed.

Then they all say to me,

Would you lead us in prayer?

Yes. But wait awhile.

I am still in some temporal confusion

that will be solved by companionship with you.

Through companionship with the ground

a grapevine grows. It opens

into the earth’s darkness and flies.

It becomes selfless in the presence

of its origin and learns what it really is.

They nod, as though to say, Whenever you are ready.

That nodding was a flame in my heart.

I was freed from hourly time,

from sequence and relation.

JANUARY 28

The Many Wines

God has given us a dark wine so potent

that, drinking it, we leave the two worlds.

God made Majnun love Layla so much

that just her dog would cause confusion in him.

There are thousands of wines

that can take over our minds.

Don’t think all ecstasies are the same.

Jesus was lost in his love for God.

His donkey was drunk with barley.

Every object, every being,

is a jar full of delight.

Be a connoiseur, and taste with caution.

Any wine will get you high.

Judge like a king, and choose the purest,

not the ones adulterated 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.

JANUARY 29

Uthman’s Silence

The story is told of Uthman, who when he became caliph

mounted quickly the steps of Muhammad’s pulpit,

whereas Abu Bakr, out of respect for the prophet,

seated himself on the second step.

There were three steps. Omar sat on the third step.

Uthman climbed to the top. When asked why, he replied,

If I sat on the third step, people would say

I was like Omar. If on the second step

He’s like Abu Bakr.

But up here where the chosen one sat, no one will think

to compare me with that king of the spirit.

And sometimes when he had climbed

to the preaching place, that sweet one Uthman,

would not say anything. He stayed silent

until midafternoon. No one asked him

for a sermon, and no one left the mosque.

In the silence many began to see with Uthman’s light.

This is how a living master opens the inner eye.

JANUARY 30

A Dumb Experiment

Break open your personal self

to taste the story of the nutmeat soul.

These voices come from that rattling

against the outer shell.

The nut and the oil inside

have voices that can only be heard

with another kind of listening.

If it weren’t for the sweetness of the nut,

the inner talking, who would ever shake a walnut?

We listen to words

so we can silently

reach into the other.

Let the ear and mouth get quiet,

so this taste can come to the lip.

Too long we have been saying poetry,

talking discourses, explaining the mystery outloud.

Let us try a dumb experiment.

JANUARY 31

Two Kinds of Intelligence

There are two kinds of intelligence: one acquired,

as a child in school memorizes facts and concepts

from books and from what the teacher says,

collecting information from the traditional sciences

as well as from the new sciences.

With such intelligence you rise in the world.

You get ranked ahead or behind others

in regard to your competence in retaining

information. You stroll with this intelligence

in and out of fields of knowledge, getting always

more marks on your preserving tablets.

There is another kind of tablet, one

already completed and preserved inside you.

A spring overflowing its springbox. A freshness

in the center of the chest. This other intelligence

does not turn yellow or stagnate. It’s fluid,

and it does not move from outside to inside

through the conduits of plumbing-learning.

This second knowing is a fountainhead

from within you, moving out.

FEBRUARY

FEBRUARY 1

As Much as a Pen Knows

Do you think that I know what I’m doing?

That for one breath or half-breath I belong to myself?

As much as a pen knows what it’s writing,

or the ball can guess where it’s going next.

FEBRUARY 2

Lightning

This is no ordinary friendship.

I attend your banquet as wine attends.

Like lightning, I am an expert at dying.

Like lightning, this beauty has no language.

It makes no difference

whether I win or lose.

You sit with us in a congregation of the dead,

where one handful of dirt says,

I was once a head of hair.

Another, I was a backbone.

You say nothing.

Love comes in, I can deliver you

from yourself in this moment.

Now lover and beloved grow quiet.

My mouth is burning with sweetness.

FEBRUARY 3

The Freshness

When it’s cold and raining,

you are more beautiful.

And the snow brings me

even closer to your lips.

The inner secret, that which was never born,

you are that freshness, and I am with you now.

I can’t explain the goings,

or the comings. You enter suddenly,

and I am nowhere again.

Inside the majesty.

FEBRUARY 4

Someone Digging in the Ground

An eye is meant to see things.

The soul is here for its own joy.

A head has one use: for loving a true love.

Legs: to run after.

Love is for vanishing into the sky. The mind,

for learning what men have done and tried to do.

Mysteries are not to be solved. The eye goes blind

when it only wants to see why.

A lover is always accused of something.

But when he finds his love, whatever was lost

in the looking comes back completely changed.

On the way to Mecca, many dangers: thieves,

the blowing sand, only camel’s milk to drink.

Still, each pilgrim kisses the black stone there

with pure longing, feeling in the surface

the taste of the lips he wants.

This talk is like stamping new coins. They pile up,

while the real work is being done outside

by someone digging in the ground.

FEBRUARY 5

Throat-Song

Let your throat-song

be clear and strong enough

to make an emperor fall full-length,

suppliant, at the door.

FEBRUARY 6

Unfold Your Own Myth

Who gets up early to discover the moment light begins?

Who finds us here circling, bewildered, like atoms?

Who, like Jacob blind with grief and age,

smells the shirt of his lost so

and can see again?

Who lets a bucket down and brings up

a flowing prophet? Or like Moses goes for fire

and finds what burns inside the sunrise?

Jesus slips into a house to escape enemies,

and opens a door to the other world.

Solomon cuts open a fish, and there’s a gold ring.

Omar storms in to kill the prophet

and leaves with blessings.

But don’t be satisfied with stories, how things

have gone with others. Unfold

your own myth, 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.

FEBRUARY 7

I Honor Those

I honor those who try

to rid themselves of any lying,

who empty the self

and have only clear being there.

FEBRUARY 8

A Pilgrimage to a Person

When you are not with close friends,

you are not in the presence.

It is sad to leave the people you travel with.

How much moreso those who remind you of God.

Hurry back to the ones protecting you.

On every trip, have only one objective,

to meet those who are friends

inside the presence.

If you stay home, keep the same purpose,

to meet the innermost presence

as it lives in people.

Be a pilgrim to the kaaba inside a human being,

and Mecca will rise into view on its own.

FEBRUARY 9

The One Thing You Must Do

There is one thing in this world which you must never forget to do. If you forget everything else and not this, there is nothing to worry about, but if you remember everything else and forget this, then you will have done nothing in your life.

It is as if a king has sent you to some country to do a task, and you perform a hundred other services, but not the one he sent you to do. So human beings come to this world to do particular work. That work is the purpose, and each is specific to the person. If you don’t do it, it’s as though a knife of the finest tempering were nailed into a wall to hang things on. For a penny an iron nail could be bought to serve for that.

Remember the deep root of your being, the presence of your lord. Give your life to the one who already owns your breath and your moments. If you don’t, you will be like the one who takes a precious dagger and hammers it into his kitchen wall for a peg to hold his dipper gourd. You will be wasting valuable keeness and foolishly ignoring your dignity and your purpose.

FEBRUARY 10

Water and the Moon

There is a path from me to you

that I am constantly looking for,

so I try to keep clear and still

as water does with the moon.

FEBRUARY 11

The Water You Want

Someone may be clairvoyant, able to see

the future, and yet have very little wisdom.

Like the man who saw water in his dream,

and began leading everyone toward the mirage.

I am the one with heart-vision.

I have torn open the veil.

So they set out with him inside the dream,

while he is actually sleeping

beside a river of pure water.

Any search moves away from the spot

where the object of the quest is.

Sleep deeply wherever you are on the way.

Maybe some traveler will wake you.

Give up subtle thinking, the twofold, threefold

multiplication of mistakes.

Listen to the sound of waves within you.

You are dreaming your thirst,

when the water you want

is inside the big vein on your neck.

FEBRUARY 12

Evolutionary Intelligence

This groggy time we live, this is what it is like:

A man goes to sleep in the town

where he has always lived, and he dreams

he is living in another town.

He believes the reality of the dream town.

The world is that kind of sleep.

The dust of many crumbled cities

settles over us like a forgetful doze,

but we are older than those cities.

We began as a mineral. We emerged into plant life

and into the animal state. Then into being human,

and always we have forgotten our former states,

except in early spring when we almost

remember being green again.

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.

It will eventually startle us back

to the truth of who we are.

FEBRUARY 13

Escaping to the Forest

Some souls have gotten free of their bodies.

Do you see them? Open your eyes for those

who escape to meet with other escapees,

whose hearts associate in a way they have

of leaving their false selves

to live in a truer self.

I don’t mind if my companions

wander away for a while.

They will come back like a smiling drunk.

Thirsty ones die of their thirst.

A nightingale sometimes

flies from a garden

to sing in the forest.

FEBRUARY 14

Love’s Confusing Joy

If you want what visible reality

can give, you are an employee.

If you want the unseen world,

you are not living with your truth.

Both wishes are foolish,

but you’ll be forgiven for forgetting

that what you really want is

love’s confusing joy.

FEBRUARY 15

Whoever’s Calm and Sensible

There is a light seed grain inside.

You fill it with yourself, or it dies.

I’m caught in this curling energy. Your hair.

Whoever’s calm and sensible is insane.

FEBRUARY 16

The Seed Market

Can you find another market like this?

Where, with your one rose

you can buy hundreds of rose gardens?

Where, for one seed you get a whole wilderness?

For one weak breath, the divine wind?

You have been fearful of being absorbed

in the ground, or drawn up by the air.

Now your waterbead lets go

and drops into the ocean, where it came from.

This giving up is not a repenting.

It is a deep honoring of yourself.

When the ocean comes to you as a lover,

marry, at once, quickly for God’s sake.

Don’t postpone it. Existence has no better gift.

No amount of searching will find this.

A perfect falcon, for no reason,

has landed on your shoulder, and become yours.

FEBRUARY 17

The Worm’s Waking

This is how a human being can change.

There is a worm

addicted to eating grape leaves.

Suddenly, he wakes up,

call it grace, whatever, something

wakes him, and he is no longer a worm.

He is the entire vineyard,

and the orchard too, the fruit, the trunks,

a growing wisdom and joy

that does not need to devour.

FEBRUARY 18

Talking through the Door (1)

You said, Who’s at the door?

        I said, Your slave.

You said, What do you want?

        To see you and bow.

We talked through the door. I claimed

a great love and that I had given up

what the world gives to be in that love.

You said, Such claims require a witness.

        I said, This longing, these tears.

You said, Discredited witnesses.

        I said, Surely not.

You said, Who did you come with?

        This majestic imagination you gave me.

Why did you come?

        The musk of your wine was in the air.

What is your intention?

        Friendship.

FEBRUARY 19

Talking through the Door (2)

Then you asked, Where have you been most comfortable?

        In the palace.

What did you see there?

        Amazing things.

Then why is it so desolate?

        Because all that can be taken away in a second.

Who can do that?

        This clear discernment.

Where can you live safely?

        In surrender.

Is there no threat of disaster?

        Only what comes in your street,

        inside your love.

Now silence. If I tell more of this conversation,

those listening would leave themselves.

There would be no door,

no roof or window either.

FEBRUARY 20

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?

FEBRUARY 21

Dark Sweetness

The ground turns green. A drum begins.

Commentaries on the heart arrive in seven volumes.

The pen puts its head down

to give a dark sweetness to the page.

Planets go wherever they want.

Venus sways near the North Star.

The moon holds on to Leo.

The host who has no self is here.

We look into each other’s eyes.

A child is still a child

even after it has learned the alphabet.

Solomon lifts his morning cup to the mountains.

Sit down in this pavilion,

and don’t listen to religious bickering.

Be silent as we absorb the spring.

FEBRUARY 22

The Grasses

The same wind that uproots trees

makes the grasses shine.

The lordly wind loves the weakness

and the lowness of grasses.

The axe doesn’t worry how thick the branches are.

It cuts them to pieces. But not the leaves.

It leaves the leaves alone.

The motion of the body, the inhaling-exhaling,

comes from the spirit, now angry, now peaceful.

Wind destroys, and wind protects.

There is no reality but God,

says the completely surrendered sheikh,

who is an ocean for all beings.

The levels of creation are straws in that ocean.

The movement of the straws comes from an agitation

in the water. When the ocean wants the straws calm,

it sends them close to shore. When it wants them

back in the deep surge, it does with them

as the wind does with the grasses.

FEBRUARY 23

When I Am with You

When I am with you, we stay up all night.

When you are not here, I can’t go to sleep.

Praise God for these two insomnias.

And the difference between them.

FEBRUARY 24

Red Shirt

Has anyone seen the boy who used to come here?

Round-faced troublemaker, quick to find a joke, slow

to be serious. Red shirt,

perfect coordination, sly,

strong muscles, with things always in his pocket.

Reed flute, ivory pick, polished

and ready for his talent.

You know that one.

Have you heard stories about him?

Pharaoh and the whole Egyptian world

collapsed for such a Joseph.

I would gladly spend years getting word

of him, even third- or fourth-hand.

FEBRUARY 25

My Worst Habit

My worst habit is I get so tired of winter

I become a torture to those I’m with.

If you are not here, nothing grows.

I lack clarity. My words

tangle and knot up.

How to cure bad water? Send it back to the river.

How to cure bad habits? Send me back to you.

When water gets caught in habitual whirpools,

dig a way out through the bottom

to the ocean. There is a secret medicine

given only to those who hurt so hard

they can’t hope.

The hopers would feel slighted if they knew.

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.

FEBRUARY 26

Red

Red with shyness, the red

that became all the rosegarden reds.

The red distance,

red of the stove boiling water,

red of the mountain turning bloodred,

a mountain holding rubies secretly inside.

Do I love more you

or your modesty?

FEBRUARY 27

Body Intelligence (1)

Your intelligence is always with you,

overseeing your body, even though

you may not be aware of its work.

If you start doing something

against your health, your intelligence

will eventually scold you.

If it had not been so lovingly close by,

and so constantly monitoring,

how could it rebuke?

You and your body’s intelligence

are like the beauty and precision

of an astrolabe.

Together, you calculate how near

existence is to the sun.

Your intelligence is marvelously intimate.

It is not in front of you or behind,

or to the left or the right.

Now, my friend, try to describe how near

is the creator of your intelligence.

FEBRUARY 28

Body Intelligence (2)

There are guides

who can show you the way.

Use them.

But they will not satisfy your longing.

Keep wanting the connection with presence

with all your pulsing energy.

The throbbing vein

will take you further

than any thinking.

Muhammed said, Do not theorize

about essence. All speculations

are just more layers of covering.

Human beings love coverings.

They think the designs on the curtains

are what is being concealed.

Observe the wonders as they occur around you.

Do not claim them. Feel the artistry

moving through, and be silent.

FEBRUARY 29

Dervishes

You have heard of the ocean of nonexistence.

Try continually to give yourself to that ocean.

Every workshop has its foundations

set on that emptiness.

The master of all masters works with nothing.

The more such nothing comes into your work,

the more the presence will be there.

Dervishes gamble everything.

They lose and win the other,

the emptiness which animates this.

We have talked so much.

Remember what we have not said.

And keep working. Laziness and disdain

are not devotions. Your effort

will bring a result.

As dawn lightens, blow out the candle.

Dawn is in your eyes now.

MARCH

MARCH 1

I Have Five Things to Say

I have five things to say,

five fingers to give into your grace.

First, when I was apart from you,

   this world did not exist, nor any other.

Second, whatever I was looking for was always you.

Third, why did I ever learn to count to three?

Fourth, my cornfield is burning!

Fifth, this finger stands for Rabia, and this

   is for someone else. Is there a difference?

Are these words or tears?

Is weeping speech? What shall I do, my love?

So he speaks, and everyone around

begins to cry with him, laughing crazily,

moaning in the spreading union of lover and beloved.

This is the true religion. All others

are thrown-away bandages beside it.

This is the sema of slavery and mastery

dancing together. This is not-being.

I know these dancers. Day and night

I sing their songs in this phenomenal cage.

MARCH 2

There Is Some Kiss We Want

There is some kiss we want

with our whole lives,

the touch of spirit on the body.

Seawater begs the pearl

to break its shell.

And the lily, how passionately

it needs some wild darling.

At night, I open the window

and ask the moon to come

and press its face against mine.

Breathe into me.

Close the language-door

and open the love-window.

The moon won’t use the door,

only the window.

MARCH 3

The Tent

Outside, the freezing desert night.

This other night inside grows warm, kindling.

Let the landscape be covered with thorny crust.

We have a soft garden in here.

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.

MARCH 4

This World Which Is Made of Our Love for Emptiness

Praise to the emptiness that blanks out existence.

Existence: this place made from our love

for that emptiness!

Yet somehow comes emptiness,

this existence goes.

Praise to that happening over and over.

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.

The here-and-now mountain is a tiny piece

of a piece of straw

blown into emptiness.

These words I am saying so much begin to lose meaning.

Existence, emptiness, mountain, straw.

Words and what they try to say,

swept out the window, down the slant of the roof.

MARCH 5

Strange Frenzy

There is a strange frenzy in my head,

of birds flying,

each particle circulating on its own.

Is the one I love everywhere?

MARCH 6

The Milk of Millenia

I am part of the load

not rightly balanced.

I drop off in the grass

like the old cave-sleepers, to browse

wherever I fall.

For hundreds of thousands of years I have been dustgrains

floating and flying in the will of the air,

often forgetting ever being

in that state, but in sleep

I migrate back. I spring loose

from the four-branched, time-and-space cross

this waiting room.

I walk out into a huge pasture.

I nurse the milk of millenia.

Everyone does this in different ways.

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.

MARCH 7

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.

MARCH 8

The Lame Goat

You have 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 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.

Learn from the lame goat,

and lead the herd home.

MARCH 9

The You Pronoun

Someone asked once, What is love?

Be lost in me, I said. You will know love when that happens.

Love has no calculating in it. That is why it is said to be a quality of God and not of human beings. God loves you is the only possible sentence. The subject becomes the object so totally that it can’t be turned around. Who will the you pronoun stand for if you say, You love God?

MARCH 10

Buoyancy

I saw you and became empty.

This emptiness, more beautiful than existence,

it obliterates existence, and yet when it comes,

existence thrives and creates more existence.

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.

So the sea-journey goes on, and who knows where?

Just to be held by the ocean is the best luck

we could have. It is a total waking-up.

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.

MARCH 11

Locked Out of Life

Again it happens in my sleep.

A core of wakefulness opens.

But I have ways of ignoring that.

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?

If I could repeat it, people passing by

would be enlightened and go free.

You are an ocean in my chest

where everyone changes places,

believer-unbeliever, cynic-lover,

dervish-king.

Last night you came to my sleep

asking, How are you?

Locked out of life, waiting, weeping.

MARCH 12

Sufi Masters (1)

Sufi masters are those

whose spirits existed before the world.

Before the body, they lived many lifetimes.

Before seeds went into the ground, they harvested wheat.

Before there was an ocean, they strung pearls.

While the great meeting was going on about bringing

human beings into existence, they stood up to their chins

in wisdom water. When some of the angels opposed creation,

the Sufi sheikhs laughed and clapped among themselves.

Before materiality, they knew what it was like

to be trapped inside matter. Before there was a night sky,

they saw Saturn. Before wheat grains, they tasted bread.

With no mind, they thought. Immediate intuition to them

is the simplest act of consciousness, what to others

would be epiphany. Much of our thought is of the past,

or the future. They are free of those.

Before a mine is dug, they judge coins.

Before vineyards, they know the excitements to come.

In July, they feel December. In unbroken sunlight,

they find shade. In fana, the state where all object

dissolve, they recognize objects.

MARCH 13

Sufi Masters (2)

The open sky drinks from their circling cup.

The sun wears the gold of their generosity.

When two of them meet, they are no longer two.

They are one, and six hundred thousand.

The ocean waves are their closest likeness

when wind makes from unity the numerous.

This happened to the sun, and it broke into rays.

The disc of the sun does exist, but if you see

only the ray-bodies, you may have doubts.

The human-divine combination is a oneness.

Plurality, the apparent separation into rays.

Friends, we are traveling together.

Throw off your tiredness. Let me show you

one tiny spot of the beauty that cannot be spoken.

I am like an ant that has gotten into the granary,

ludicrously happy, and trying to lug out

a grain that is way too big.

MARCH 14

Flood Residue

The taste of today is not that of yesterday.

A pot boils over.

A watchman calls down the ladder,

Did you hear the commotion last night

from the seventh level?

Saturn turns to Venus and tells her

to play the strings more gently.

Taurus milk runs red. Leo slinks from the sky.

Strange signs, because of a word

that comes from the soul

to help us escape from speaking and concepts.

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.

MARCH 15

A Poem in a Letter

Before death takes away what you are given,

give away what is there to give.

No dead person grieves for his death. He mourns only what he didn’t do. Why did I wait? Why did I not…? Why did I neglect to…?

I cannot think of better advice to send. I hope you like it. May you stay in your infinity.

Peace.

*One hundred and forty-seven of Rumi’s letters survive. Many of them contain lines of poetry composed while writing the letters.

MARCH 16

Humble Living

Humble living does not diminish. It fills.

Going back to a simpler self gives wisdom.

When a man makes up a story for his child,

he becomes a father and a child

together, listening.

MARCH 17

Morning Water and a Poet

We learn this from a drunken king

who wakes up hungover and sick,

asking for two things, a morning drink of water,

and Let it be brought by a poet.

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. Let it bring

you morning water and a poet.

MARCH 18

Wax

When I see you and how you are,

I close my eyes to the other.

For your Solomon’s seal I become wax

throughout my body. I wait to be light.

I give up opinions on all matters.

I become the reed flute for your breath.

You were inside my hand.

I kept reaching around for something.

I was inside your hand, but I kept asking questions

of those who know very little.

I must have been incredibly simple or drunk or insane

to sneak into my own house and steal money,

to climb over my own fence and take my own vegetables.

But no more. I have gotten free of that ignorant fist

that was pinching and twisting my secret self.

The universe and the light of the stars come through me.

I am the crescent moon put up

over the gate to the festival.

MARCH 19

Dissolver of Sugar

Dissolver of sugar, dissolve me,

if this is the time.

Do it gently with a touch of a hand, or a look.

Every morning I wait at dawn. That’s when

it has happened before. Or do it suddenly

like an execution. How else

can I get ready for death?

You breathe without a body, like a spark.

You grieve, and I begin to feel lighter.

You keep me away with your arm,

but the keeping away is pulling me in.

MARCH 20

The Waterwheel

Stay together, friends.

Don’t scatter and sleep.

Our friendship is made

of being awake.

The waterwheel accepts water

and turns and gives it away,

weeping.

That way it stays in the garden,

whereas another roundness

rolls through a dry riverbed looking

for what it thinks it wants.

Stay here, quivering with each moment

like a drop of mercury.

MARCH 21

Spring Is Christ

Everyone has eaten and fallen asleep.

The house is empty.

We walk out to the garden to let the apple

meet the peach, to carry messages

between rose and jasmine.

Spring is Christ,

raising martyred plants from their shrouds.

A leaf trembles. I tremble

in the wind-beauty like silk from Turkestan.

The censer fans into flame.

This wind is the Holy Spirit.

The trees are Mary.

Watch how husband and wife play subtle games

with their hands. Strings of cloudy pearls

are thrown across the lovers,

as is the marriage custom.

We talk about this and that. There is no rest

except on these branching moments.

MARCH 22

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 are covered with thick cloud.

Slide out the side. Die,

and be quiet. Quietness is the surest sign

that you have died.

Your old life was a frantic running

from silence.

The speechless full moon

comes out now.

MARCH 23

The Sun Is Love

The sun is love. The lover,

a speck circling the sun.

A spring wind moves to dance

any branch that isn’t dead.

MARCH 24

Spring

Again the violet bows to the lily.

Again, the rose is tearing off her gown.

The green ones have come from the other world,

tipsy like the breeze up to some new foolishness.

Again, near the top of the mountain

the anemone’s sweet features appear.

The hyacinth speaks formally to the jasmine.

Peace be with you. And peace to you, lad.

Come walk with me in the meadow.

The Friend is here like water in the stream,

like a lotus on the water.

The ringdove comes asking, Where,

where is the Friend? With one note

the nightingale indicates the rose.

Many things must be left unsaid because it is late,

but whatever conversation we have not had

tonight, we will have tomorrow.

MARCH 25

A Bowl

Imagine the time the particle you are

returns where it came from.

The family darling comes home. Wine,

without being contained in cups,

is handed around.

A red glint appears in a granite outcrop,

and suddenly the whole cliff turns to ruby.

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.

Shams, and actual sunlight, help me now,

being in the middle of being

partly in myself, and partly outside.

MARCH 26

The Orchard

Come to the orchard in spring.

There is light and wine and sweethearts

in the pomegranate flowers.

If you do not come, these do not matter.

If you do come, these do not matter.

MARCH 27

A Wished-For Song

You are song, a wished-for song.

Go through the ear to the center,

where sky is, where wind,

where silent knowing.

Put seeds and cover them.

Blades will sprout

where you do your work.

MARCH 28

Joseph

Joseph has come, the handsome one of this age,

a victory banner floating over spring flowers.

Those of you whose work it is to wake the dead,

get up. This is a work day.

The lion that hunts lions charges into the meadow.

Yesterday and the day before are gone.

The beautiful coin of now slaps down in your hand.

Start the drumbeat. Everything we have said

about the Friend is true. The beauty of that

peacefulness makes the whole world restless.

Spread your love-robe out to catch

what sifts down from the ninth level.

You heart closed up in a chest, open,

for the Friend is entering you.

You feet, it is time to dance.

Don’t talk about the old man.

He is young again. And don’t mention

the past. Do you understand?

The beloved is here.

MARCH 29

How We Move Inside Grace (1)

When our water here

becomes saturated with pollution,

it gets led back to the original water, the ocean.

After a year of receiving starlight,

the water returns, sweeping new robes along.

Where have you been? In the ocean of purity.

Now I am ready for more cleaning work.

If there were no impurity, what would water do?

It shows its glory in how it washes a face,

and in other qualities as well,

the way it grows the grass

and lifts a ship across to another port.

When the river slows with the weight of silt

and corruption, it grows sad and prays,

Lord, what you gave me I gave others.

Is there more? Can you give more?

Clouds draw the water up to become rain;

the ocean takes the river back into itself.

What this means is

we often need to be refreshed.

MARCH 30

How We Move Inside Grace (2)

Water is the story of how we are helped.

Hot baths prepare us to enter the fire.

Only salamanders can go directly in

without an intermediary, salamanders and Abraham.

The rest of us need guidance from water.

Satisfaction comes from God,

but to get there you need to eat bread.

Beauty comes from the presence,

but those of us in bodies

must walk in a garden to feel it.

When this body-medium goes, we will see directly

the light that lives in the chest.

The qualities of water are showing us

how we move inside grace.

MARCH 31

A Turning Night

This moment, this love, comes to rest in me,

many beings in one being.

In one wheatgrain a thousand sheaf-stacks.

Inside the needle’s eye, a turning night of stars.

APRIL

APRIL 1

The Diver’s Clothes

You are sitting here with us,

but you are also out walking in a field at dawn.

You are yourself the animal we hunt

when you come with us on the hunt.

You are in your body

like a plant is solid in the ground,

yet you are wind.

You are the diver’s clothes

lying empty on the beach.

You are the fish.

In the ocean are many bright strands

and many dark strands like veins that are seen

when a wing is lifted up.

Your hidden self is blood in those,

those veins that are lute strings

that make ocean music,

not the sad edge of surf,

but the sound of no shore.

APRIL 2

Our Closeness

Friend, our closeness is this.

Anywhere you put your foot

feel me in the firmness under you.

How is it with this love,

I see your world and not you?

APRIL 3

On Resurrection Day

On Resurrection Day your body testifies against you.

Your hand says, I stole money.

Your lips, I said meanness.

Your feet, I went where I shouldn’t.

Your genitals, me too.

They will make your praying sound hypocritical.

Let the body’s doings speak openly now,

without your saying a word,

as a student’s walking behind a teacher

says, This one knows more clearly

than I the way.

APRIL 4

Already Under

Late by myself, in the boat of myself,

no light and no land anywhere,

cloudcover thick.

I try to stay just above the surface,

yet I am already under

and living within the ocean.

APRIL 5

Urgency

When the captain sees the girl,

he immediately falls in love with her

like the Caliph.

Don’t laugh at this.

His loving is also part of infinite love,

without which the world does not evolve.

Forms move from inorganic to vegetation

to selves endowed with spirit

through the urgency of every love

that wants to come to perfection.

APRIL 6

Blessing

I want to be where

your bare foot walks,

because maybe before you step,

you will look at the ground.

I want that blessing.

APRIL 7

This Day

This is not a day for asking questions,

not a day on any calendar.

This day is conscious of itself.

This day is a lover, bread and gentleness.

APRIL 8

Childsplay

There is no one with intelligence

in our town except that man over there

playing with the children.

He has keen, fiery insight

and vast dignity like the nightsky,

but he conceals it in childsplay.

APRIL 9

Let Yourself Be Drawn

You miss the garden,

because you want a small fig from a random tree.

You do not meet the beautiful woman.

You are joking with an old crone.

It makes me cry how she detains you,

stinking-mouthed with a hundred talons,

putting her head over the roof edge to call down,

tasteless fig, fold over fold, empty

as a dry-rotten garlic.

She has you tight by the belt,

even though there is no flower

and no milk inside her body.

Death will open your eyes

to what her face is: leather spine

of a black lizard. No more advice.

Let yourself be silently drawn

by the stronger pull of what you really love.

APRIL 10

Burnt Kabob

Last year I admired wines.

This year I am wandering inside the red world.

Last year I gazed at the fire.

This year I am burnt kabob.

Thirst drove me down to the water,

where I drank the moon’s reflection.

Now I am a lion staring up

totally lost in love with the thing itself.

Do not ask questions about longing.

Look in my face.

Soul-drunk, body-ruined, these two

sit helpless in a wrecked wagon.

Neither knows how to fix it.

And my heart, I would say it is more

like a donkey sunk in a mudhole,

struggling and miring deeper.

But listen to me. For one moment

quit being sad. Hear blessings

dropping their blossoms

around you. God.

APRIL 11

Be Your Note

Remember the lips where wind-breath

originated, and let your note be clear.

Don’t try to end it.

Be your note.

I’ll show you how it’s enough.

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!

APRIL 12

An Egypt That Does Not Exist

I want to say words that flame

as I say them, but I keep quiet

and don’t try to make both worlds

fit in one mouthful.

I keep secret in myself

an Egypt that does not exist.

Is that good or bad? I don’t know.

For years I gave away sexual

love with my eyes. Now I don’t.

I am not in any one place.

I do not have a name for what I give away.

Whatever Shams gave,

that you can have from me.

APRIL 13

An Evolving Course

We began as a mineral.

We emerged into plant life and into

the animal state, and then to being human.

And always we have forgotten our former states,

except in early spring,

when we dimly recall being green again.

That is how a young person turns

toward a teacher, how a baby leans

toward the breast, without knowing

the secret of its desire,

yet turning instinctively.

So 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.

It will eventually startle us back

to the truth of who we are.

APRIL 14

Fog

As fog rising off the sea

covers the sea,

so it is noble work to build

coherent philosophical discourses,

but they block the sun of truth.

See God’s qualities as an ocean

and this world as foam

on the purity of that ocean.

Here is the mystery.

This intricate, astonishing world

is proof of God’s existence,

even as it covers the beauty.

One flake from the wall of a goldmine

does not give much idea

what it is like

when the sun shines in

and turns the air

and the workers golden.

APRIL 15

Bewilderment

There are many guises for intelligence.

One part of you is gliding in a high windstream,

while your more ordinary notions

take little steps and peck at the ground.

Conventional knowledge is death to our souls,

and it is not really ours. It is laid on.

Yet we keep saying we find “rest” in these “beliefs.”

We must become ignorant of what we have been taught

and be instead bewildered.

Run from what is profitable and comfortable.

Distrust anyone who praises you.

Give your investment money, and the interest

on the capital, to those who are actually destitute.

Forget safety. Live where you fear to live.

Destroy your reputation. Be notorious.

I have tried prudent planning long enough.

From now on, I’ll be mad.

APRIL 16

The Buddhist Sufi

Last night my soul asked a question of existence.

Why are you upsidedown with flames in your belly?

Happy, unhappy, indigo-orange like the sky?

Why are you an off-balance wobbling millstone,

like the Buddhist Sufi, Ibrahim Balkhi,

who was king, beggar, buddha, and dervish?

Existence answers, All this was made

by the one who hides inside you.

You are like a beautiful new bride,

quick to anger, stubborn,

hot, naked, but still veiled.

APRIL 17

Half-Heartedness

Gamble everything for love,

if you are a true human being.

If not, leave this gathering.

Half-heartedness does not reach

into majesty. You set out

to find God, but then you keep

stopping for long periods

at mean-spirited roadhouses.

APRIL 18

A Small Green Island

There is a small green island

where one white cow lives alone, a meadow of an island.

The cow grazes till nightfull, full and fat,

but during the night she panics

and grows thin as a single hair.

What shall I eat tomorrow? There is nothing left.

By dawn the grass has grown up again, waist-high.

The cow starts eating and by dark

the meadow is clipped short.

She is full of strength and energy, but she panics

in the dark as before and grows abnormally thin overnight.

The cow does this over and over,

and this is all she does.

She never thinks, This meadow has never failed

to grow back. Why should I be afraid every night

that it won’t. The cow is the bodily soul.

The island field is this world where that grows

lean with fear and fat with blessing, lean and fat.

White cow, don’t make yourself miserable

with what’s to come, or not to come.

APRIL 19

Sheba’s Throne (1)

When the Queen of Sheba came to Solomon,

she left behind her kingdom and her wealth,

the same way lovers leave their reputations.

Her servants meant nothing to her,

less than a rotten onion.

Her palaces and orchards, so many piles of dung.

She heard the inner meaning of LA: No.

She came to Solomon with nothing, except her throne.

As the writer’s pen becomes a friend,

as the tool the workman uses day

after day becomes deeply familiar, so her filigreed throne

was her one attachment.

It was a large throne and difficult to transport,

because it could not be taken apart,

being as cunningly put together as the human body.

APRIL 20

Sheba’s Throne (2)

Solomon saw that her heart was open to him

and that the throne would soon be left behind.

Let her bring it, he said.

It will soon become a lesson to her.

She can look at that throne

and see how far she has come.

In the same way God keeps the process

of generation constantly before us.

The smooth skin and the semen,

the wet of desire and the growing embryo.

When you see a pearl on the bottom,

you reach through the foam and the broken sticks

on the surface. When the sun comes up,

you forget about the problem of locating

the constellation of Scorpio.

Inside the splendor of union,

the attractions of duality seem poignant

and lovely, but much less interesting.

APRIL 21

I, You, He, She, We

I, you, he, she, we.

In the garden of mystic lovers

these are not true distinctions.

APRIL 22

Your Features

The light you give off

did not come from a pelvis.

Your features did not begin in semen.

Do not try to hide inside anger

radiance that cannot be hidden.

APRIL 23

How You Are with Me

God spoke to Moses,

You are the one I have chosen,

and I love you.

Moses replies, I feel the generosity,

but say what it is in me

that causes your love.

God explains, You have seen

a little child with its mother.

It does not know anyone else exists.

The mother praises or scolds,

a little slap perhaps,

but still the child reaches

to be held by her.

Disappointment, elation,

there is only one direction

that the child turns.

That is how

you are with me.

APRIL 24

Night Prayer

Now I lay me down

to stay awake.

Pray the Lord my soul to take

into your wakefulness,

so that I can get this one bit

of wisdom clear.

Grace comes to forgive

and then forgive again.

APRIL 25

The Way That Moves as You Move

Some commentary on the quatrain:

As you start on the way, the way appears.

When you cease to be, real being comes.

This is how you slip through

to your non-spatial home.

Think of how you came into this world.

Can you explain how that was? No? The same way

that you came is the way you will leave.

You wander landscapes in your dreams.

How did you get there? Close your eyes and surrender,

and find yourself in the city of God.

But you are still looking for admiration.

You love how your customers look at you.

You love to sit at the head of the assembly.

You close your eyes and see people applauding

as surely as an owl shuts and sees the forest.

You live in an admiration-world,

but what do you offer your admirers?

If you had true spirit-gifts to give,

you would not think of customers.

APRIL 26

The Well

We seem to be sitting still,

but we are actually moving,

and the fantasies of phenomena

are sliding though us,

like ideas through curtains.

They go to the well of deep love

inside each of us.

They fill their jars there

and they leave.

There is a source they come from,

and a fountain inside here.

Be generous and grateful.

Confess when you’re not.

We cannot know

what the divine intelligence has in mind.

Who am I,

standing in the midst of this

thought-traffic?

APRIL 27

The Sight of a Soul

One of the marvels of the world

is the sight of a soul sitting in prison

with the key in its hand.

Covered with dust,

with a cleansing waterfall an inch away.

A young man rolls from side to side,

though the bed is comfortable

and a pillow holds his head.

He has a living master, yet he wants more,

and there is more.

If a prisoner had not lived outside,

he would not detest the dungeon.

Desiring knows there is a satisfaction

beyond this. Straying maps the path.

A secret freedom opens

through a crevice you can barely see.

The awareness a wine drinker wants

cannot be tasted in wine, but that failure

brings his deep thirst closer.

APRIL 28

The Question (1)

One dervish to another, What was your vision

of God’s presence? I haven’t seen anything,

but for the sake of conversation, I will tell you a story.

The presence is there in front of me.

A fire on the left, a lovely stream on the right.

One group walks toward the fire, into the fire.

Another toward the sweet flowing water.

No one knows which are blessed and which not.

Whoever walks into the fire appears suddenly

in the stream. A head goes underwater

and that head pokes out of the fire.

Most people guard against going into the fire

and so end up in it. Those who love the water

of pleasure and make it their devotion

are cheated with this reversal. The trickery goes further.

The voice of the fire tells the truth, sayin

I am not fire. I am fountainhead.

Come into me and don’t mind the sparks.

If you are a friend of the presence,

fire is your water.

APRIL 29

The Question (2)

You should wish to have a hundred thousand sets

of mothwings, so you could burn them away, one set a night.

The moth sees light and goes into fire. You should see fire

and go to the 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.

You have seen a magician make a bowl of rice

seem a dish of tiny, live worms. Before an assembly, with one

   breath he made the floor swarm with scorpions

that were not there. How much more amazing God’s tricks.

   Generation after generation lies down defeated, they think,

but they are like a woman underneath a man, circling him.

One molecule-mote-second of considering

this reversal of comfort and pain

is better than any attending ritual.

That splinter of intelligence is substance.

The fire and water themselves?

Accidental, done with mirrors.

APRIL 30

When Living Itself

If the beloved is everywhere,

the lover is a veil,

but when living itself becomes

the Friend, lovers disappear.

MAY

MAY 1

The Way You Make Love

The way you make love is

the way God will be with you.

*This is Rumi’s variation on the golden rule.

MAY 2

Response to Your Question

Why ask about behavior

when you are soul-essence

and a way of seeing into presence?

Plus you are with us. How could you worry?

You may as well free a few words

from your vocabulary: why and how and impossible.

Open the mouth-cage and let those fly away.

We were all born by accident,

but still this wandering caravan

will make camp in perfection.

Forget the nonsense categories

of there and here.

Race and nation and religion.

Starting-point and destination.

You are soul and you are love,

not a sprite or an angel or a human being.

You are a Godman-womanGod-manGod-Godwoman.

No more questions now

as to what it is we are doing here.

MAY 3

What Was Said to the Rose

What was said to the rose that made it open

was said to me here in my chest.

What was told the cypress

that made it strong and straight,

what was whispered the jasmine

so it is what it is,

whatever made sugarcane sweet,

whatever was said to the inhabitants

of the town of Chigil in Turkestan

that makes them so handsome,

whatever lets the pomegranate flower

blush like a human face,

that is being said to me now. I blush.

Whatever put eloquence in language,

that’s happening here.

The great warehouse doors open,

and I fill with gratitude,

chewing a piece of sugarcane,

in love with the one

to whom every that belongs.

MAY 4

The Most Alive Moment

The most alive moment comes

when those who love each other

meet each other’s eyes

and in what flows between them then.

To see your face in a crowd of others,

or alone on a frightening street,

I weep for that.

Our tears improve the earth.

The time you scolded me,

your gratitude, your laughing,

always your qualities increase the soul.

Seeing you is a wine

that does not muddle or numb.

We sit inside the cypress shadow

where amazement and clear thought

twine their slow growth into us.

MAY 5

Cry Out

Crying out loud and weeping are great resources.

A nursing mother, all she does

is wait to hear her child.

Just a little beginning-whimper

and she’s there.

Cry out. Do not be stolid and silent

with your pain. Lament,

and let the milk of loving flow into you.

The hard rain and the wind

are ways the cloud has

to take care of us.

MAY 6

The Old Poet’s Waking

The old man’s heart woke,

no longer in love with treble and bass,

without weeping or laughter.

In the true bewilderment of soul

he went out beyond any seeking, beyond words

and telling, drowned in the beauty,

drowned beyond deliverance.

Waves cover the old man.

Nothing more can be said of him.

He has shaken out his robe,

and there’s nothing in it anymore.

There is a chase where a falcon

dives into the forest

and does not come back up.

Every moment, the sunlight

is totally empty and totally full.

MAY 7

Daring Enough to Finish

Face that lights my face,

you spin intelligence into these particles

I am. Your wind shivers my tree.

You make my dance daring enough to finish.

No more timidity. Let fruit fall,

and wind turn my roots up in the air,

done with patient waiting.

MAY 8

The Vigil

Lovers cannot sleep

when they feel the privacy

of the beloved all around them.

Someone who is thirsty

may sleep for a little while,

but he or she will dream of water,

a full jar beside a creek,

or the spirit-water you get

from another person.

All night, listen to the conversation.

Stay up. This moment is all there is.

MAY 9

The Wandering Kings

The King of Tabuk went on like this,

praising Imra’u ’l-Qays, and talking theology

and philosophy. Imra’u ’l-Qays kept silent.

Then suddenly he leaned and whispered something

in the second king’s ear, and that second

that second king became a wanderer too.

They walked out of town hand in hand.

No royal belts, no thrones.

This is what love does and continues to do.

It tastes like honey to adults and milk to children.

Love is the last thirty-pound bale.

When you load it on, the boat tips over.

So they wandered around China like birds pecking

at bits of grain. They rarely spoke because

of the dangerous seriousness of the secret they knew.

That love-secret spoken pleasantly, or in irritation,

severs a hundred thousand heads in one swing.

A love-lion grazes in the soul’s pasture,

while the scimitar of this secret approaches.

It is a killing better than any living.

All that world-power wants, really, is this weakness.

MAY 10

Whatever You Really See

A human being is essentially

a spirit-eye.

Whatever you really see,

you are that.

MAY 11

Constant Conversation

Who is luckiest in this whole orchestra? The reed.

Its mouth touches your lips to learn music.

All reeds, sugarcane especially, think only

of this chance. They sway in the canebrake,

free in the many ways they dance.

Without you the instruments would die.

One sits close beside you. Another takes a long kiss.

The tambourine begs, Touch my skin, so I can be myself.

Let me feel you enter each limb bone by bone,

that what died last night can be whole today.

Why live some soberer way and feel you ebbing out?

I won’t do it.

Either give me enough wine or leave me alone,

now that I know how it is

to be with you in a constant conversation.

MAY 12

Presences

Listen to presences inside poems.

Let them take you where they will.

Follow those private hints,

and never leave the premises.

MAY 13

The Truest Devotion

Moses ran after the shepherd.

He followed the bewildered footprints,

in one place moving straight like a castle

across a chessboard.

    Then sideways, like a bishop.

Now surging, like a wave cresting.

         Now sliding down

like a fish, with always his feet

          making geomancy

symbols in the sand,

  recording his wandering state.

Moses finally caught up with him.

I was wrong. God has revealed to me

that there are no rules for worship.

Say whatever and however your loving tells you to.

Your sweet blasphemy is the truest devotion.

Through you a whole world is freed.

Loosen your tongue

and don’t worry what comes out.

It is all the light of the spirit.

MAY 14

Music Master

You that love lovers,

this is your home. Welcome.

In the midst of making form,

love made this form that melts form,

with love for the door

and soul for the vestibule.

Watch the dust grains

moving in the light near the window.

Their dance is our dance.

We rarely hear the inward music,

but we are all dancing to it nevertheless,

directed by the one who teaches us,

the pure joy of the sun,

our music master.

MAY 15

The Uses of Fear

A donkey turning a millstone is not trying

to press oil from sesame seed. He is fleeing the blow

that was just struck and hoping to avoid the next.

For the same reason, the ox takes a load

of baggage wherever you want him to.

Shopkeepers work for themselves,

not for the flow of communal exchange.

We look to ease our pain, and this keeps civilization

moving along. Fear is the architect here.

Fear keeps us working near the ark.

Some human beings are safe havens.

Be companions with them. Others may seem to be friends,

but they are really consuming your essence

like donkeys lapping sherbet. Detach from them,

and feel your flexibility returning.

The inner moisture that lets you bend

into a basket handle is a quickening inside

that no one is ever afraid of.

Sometimes though, it is fear, a contracting,

that brings you into the presence.

MAY 16

The Lord of Beauty

The lord of beauty enters the soul

as a man walks into an orchard in spring.

Come into me that way again.

Like a fresh idea in an artist’s mind,

you fashion things before they come into being.

You sweep the floor like the man

who keeps the doorway.

When you brush a form clean,

it becomes what it truly is.

You guard your silence perfectly

like a waterbag that does not leak.

You live where Shams lives,

because your heart-donkey

was strong enough to take you there.

MAY 17

The Pickaxe (1)

Some commentary on I was a hidden treasure,

and I desired to be known.

Tear down this house.

A hundred thousand new houses can be built

from the transparent yellow carnelian

buried beneath it, and the only way to get to that

is to do the work of demolition,

and then the digging beneath the foundation.

With that value in hand all the new construction

will be done without effort. And anyway, sooner or later,

the house will fall on its own.

The jewel treasure will be uncovered,

but it will not be yours then.

The buried wealth is your pay

for doing the demolition,

the pick and shovel work.

If you wait and just let it happen,

you will bite your hand and say,

I did not do as I knew I should have.

MAY 18

The Pickaxe (2)

This is a rented house.

You do not own the deed.

You have a lease, and you have set up

a little shop where you barely make a living

sewing patches on torn clothing.

Yet only a few feet underneath

are two veins, pure red and bright gold carnelian.

Quick. Take the pickaxe and pry the foundation.

You have got to quit this seamstress work.

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 floor

and look into the basement.

You may see two glints in the dirt.

MAY 19

My First Love Story

The minute I heard my first love story

I started looking for you,

not knowing how blind that was.

Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere.

They are in each other all along.

MAY 20

Some Song or Something

Birdsong brings relief

to my longing.

I am just as ecstatic as they are,

but with nothing to say.

Please, universal soul, practice

some song, or something, through me.

MAY 21

The Nightingale’s Way

A bird delegation comes to Solomon

complaining, Why is it

you never criticise the nightingale?

Because my way, the nightingale explains

for Solomon, is different.

Mid-March to mid-June I sing.

The other nine months,

while you continue chirping,

I am silent.

MAY 22

Having Nothing

Whatever comes, comes from a need,

a sore distress, a hurting want.

Mary’s pain made the baby Jesus.

Her womb opened its lips

and spoke the Word.

Every part of you has a secret language.

Your hands and your feet say what you have done.

Every need brings in what’s needed.

Pain bears its cure like a child.

Having nothing produces provisions.

Ask a difficult question,

and the marvelous answer appears.

Build a ship, and there will be water

to float it. The tender-throated infant cries,

and milk drips from the mother’s breast.

Be thirsty for the ultimate water.

Then be ready for what will come

pouring from the spring.

MAY 23

These Lights

Inside water, a waterwheel turns.

A star circulates with the moon.

We live in the night ocean wondering,

What are these lights?

MAY 24

Flowers Open

Flowers open every night

across the sky, a breathing peace,

and sudden flame catching.

MAY 25

I Met One Traveling

In the evening between sleep and waking

I met one traveling. He was the light of consciousness.

His body was soul, his pure wisdom apparent

in his beautiful face.

He praises me for a while, then scolds.

You sit on the seven-sky throne, in prison.

The sign of Gemini has set a table for you,

yet you stick your head down a drainhole again.

Essence is not nourished with food and sleep.

Do no one any harm in this timefield

of short crops where what you sow comes up very quickly.

You try to accomplish things, to win,

to reach goals. This is not the true situation.

Put the whole world in ambition’s stomach,

it will never be enough.

Assume you get everything you want.

Assume you have it now. What’s the point?

The next moment you die.

Friend, the youth you have lived is ending.

You sleep a drunken dreamless sleep

with no sense what morning you could wake inside.

MAY 26

Discipline

Don’t avoid discipline.

You have learned ways to make a living

for your body. Now learn to support

your soul. You wear fine clothing.

How do you dress your spirit?

This world is a playground

where children pretend to have shops.

Sometimes when they wrestle,

it may look like sex,

but none of it is real.

They exchange imaginary money.

Night comes, and they go home tired

with nothing in their hands.

MAY 27

Certain Sunfish

If you put on shoes that are too tight and walk out

across an empty plain, you will not feel the freedom

of the place unless you take off your shoes.

Your shoe-constriction has you confined.

At night before sleeping you take off the tight shoes,

and your soul releases into a place it knows.

Dream and glide deeper.

Physical existence is so cramped. We grow old and bentover

like embryos. Nine months passes; it is time to be born.

The lamb wants to graze green daylight.

There are ways of being born twice, of coming

to where you fly, not individually like birds,

but as the sun moves with its bride, sincerity.

Loaves of bread remind us of sunlight,

but when we are inside that orb, we lose interest

in building ovens, in millwork and the preparation

of fields before the planting.

Fish love the ocean. Snakes move like earth-fish

inside a mountain, well away from seawater.

Certain sunfish, though, turn snakes

into ocean-lovers.

MAY 28

A Grape

If you would say I don’t exist,

I would be grateful.

When this longing makes me disreputable,

then I have a little self-respect.

A vine begins to become wine

when you say, Pressure is necessary

to burst open.

MAY 29

The Healing Presence

I go to the one who can cure me and say,

I have a hundred things wrong. Can you combine them to one?

I thought you were dead. I was, but I caught your fragrance

again, and came back to life.

Gently, his hand on my chest.

Which tribe are you from? This tribe.

He begins to treat my illness.

If I am angry and aggressive, he gives me wine.

I quit fighting. I take off my clothes.

I lie down. I sing in the circle of singers.

I roar and break cups, even big jars.

Some people worship golden calves.

I am the mangy calf who worships love.

The healing presence has called me from the hole I hid in.

My soul, if I am agile or stumbling, confused

or in my true being, it is all you.

Sometimes the sleek arrow.

Other times a worn leather thumbguard.

You bring me where everything circles.

Now you put the lid back on the wine vat, pure quiet.

MAY 30

Your First Eyes

A lover has four streams inside,

of water, wine, honey, and milk.

Find those in yourself and pay no attention

to what so-and-so says about such-and-such.

The rose does not care

if someone calls it a thorn, or a jasmine.

Ordinary eyes categorize human beings.

That one is a Zoroastrian. This one a Muslim.

Walk instead with the other vision given you,

your first eyes. Bow to the essence

in a human being. Do not be content

with judging people good and bad.

Grow out of that.

The great blessing is that Shams

has poured a strength into the ground

that lets us wait and trust the waiting.

MAY 31

The Nothing of Roselight

Death comes, and what we thought

we needed loses importance.

The living shiver, focused

on a muscular dark hand,

rather than the glowing cup it holds

or the toast being proposed.

In that same way love enters

your life, and the I, the ego,

a corrupt, self-absorbed king,

dies during the night.

Let him go.

Breathe cold new air,

the nothing of roselight.

JUNE

JUNE 1

The Flower’s Eye

Find me near the flower’s eye

that takes in provocation

and begins to grow.

Love is a baby that struggles

and fights, stops nursing, then runs out

through the door, escaping as a fire

jumping to the next burn.

JUNE 2

Inside a Country Dialect

A human being is like the rod

Moses held or the words

that Jesus said.

The outer is just a piece of wood,

or mouth-sounds of a country dialect,

whose inner parts can divide

the green ocean and make the dead

sit up and smile.

You see the far-off tents

of an encampment. You go closer.

There is a dust-shape, someone walking near.

Inside that, a man, bright eyes

and the strength of his presence.

When Moses returns from the wilderness

where he has gone alone,

Mount Sinai begins to dance.

JUNE 3

A Great Wagon

When I see your face, the stones start spinning.

You appear. All studying wanders.

I lose my place.

Water turns pearly.

Fire dies down and does not consume.

In your presence I do not want

what I thought I wanted,

those three little hanging lamps.

Inside your face the ancient manuscripts

seem like rusty mirrors.

You breathe, and new shapes appear.

The music of a desire as widespread as spring

begins to move like a great wagon.

Drive slowly.

Some of us walking alongside are lame.

JUNE 4

As a Wick Does

There is nourishment like bread

that feeds one part of your life,

nourishment like light for another.

There are many rules about restraint

with the former, but only one rule

for the latter, Never be satisfied.

Eat and drink the soul substance

as a wick does with the oil it soaks in.

Give light to the company.

JUNE 5

Up to the Neck

I sat long enough in fire.

Now I am up to my neck

in the water of union.

You say, Up to the neck

is not enough.

Make your head your foot

and descend into love.

There is no up-to-the-neck union.

I say, But for the sake of your garden

I sat up to my neck in blood.

You say, Yes, you escaped

the alluring world, but not yourself.

You are the magician

caught in his own trickery.

Cut the breath of self and be silent.

Language cannot come from your throat

as you choke and go under.

JUNE 6

No Need to Ask

The one who brings wine pours again,

no need to ask.

Do you ask the moon to rise

and give its light?

When ranks of soldiers dissolve,

dismissed for a holiday,

when a lost hand reaches

to touch the rescuing hand,

when a candle next to a mirrored

sconce gets lit,

your presence enters my soul.

JUNE 7

Again

Again, the sharp new moon blade.

Again we walk a garden

with the lily’s clever talking around us.

Green satin no tailor sews,

trees putting on their hats.

A drumming begins, and we play along

on the drums of our stomachs.

The lake that was ice and iron

now is ridged in the wind like David’s chainmail.

A voice says to the herbs, Rise up.

The mystic crane returns.

The humiliated ones dress and show

their heads in windows again.

There is a public concert on the tomb of January.

The willow shakes its head.

Those we thought were lost are back.

How the sun is with plants

is evidence enough.

JUNE 8

Father Reason

The universe is a form of divine law,

your reasonable father.

When you feel ungrateful to him,

the shapes of the world seem mean and ugly.

Make peace with that father, the elegant patterning,

and every experience will fill with immediacy.

Because I love this, I am never bored.

Beauty constantly wells up like the noise of springwater

in my ear. Tree limbs rise and fall like ecstatic arms.

Leaf sounds talk together like poets

making fresh metaphors.

The green felt cover slips;

we get a flash of the mirror underneath.

The conventional opinion of this poetry

is that it shows great optimism for the future.

But Father Reason says, No need to announce the future.

This now is it. Your deepest need and desire

is satisfied by this moment’s energy

here in your hand.

JUNE 9

The Inner Workings

The inner working of a human being

is a jungle. Sometimes wolves

dominate. Sometimes wild hogs.

Be wary when you breathe.

At one moment gentle, generous qualities,

like Joseph’s, pass from one nature

to another. The next moment

vicious qualities move in hidden ways.

In every instant a new species rises

in the chest—now a demon, now an angel,

now a wild animal, now a human friend.

There are also those in this amazing jungle

who can absorb you into their own surrender.

If you have to stalk and steal something,

steal from them.

JUNE 10

Stranded Somewhere

If you are the body, that one is the soul

of the universe. If you are the soul,

that one is the soul within all souls.

Wherever you go, whatever you are, listen for the voice

that asks, Who will be sacrificed tonight?

Jump up then and volunteer. Accept

the cup that is offered every second.

If you are bored and contemptuous,

love is a walk in a meadow.

If you are stranded somewhere,

love is an Arabian horse.

The ocean feeds itself to its fish.

If you are an ocean fish, why bother

with bread the ground grows?

These jars of grief and trouble

that we call bodies, throw stones and break them.

My cage is this longing for Shams.

Be my worst enemy. Shatter it.

JUNE 11

Morning Wind

The morning wind spreads its fresh smell.

We must get up to take that in,

that wind that lets us live.

Breathe, before it’s gone.

JUNE 12

Lamp after Lamp

You that prefer, as crows do,

winter’s chill and the empty limbs,

notice now this that fills

with new leaves and roses opening

and the nightbird’s song.

Let your love dissolve also

into this season’s moment,

or when it’s over you will buy

lamp after lamp to find it.

JUNE 13

Beyond Love Stories (1)

Love comes with a knife,

not some shy question,

and not with fears for its reputation.

I say these things disinterestedly.

Accept them in kind.

Love is a madman,

working his wild schemes,

tearing off his clothes,

drinking poison, and now quietly

choosing annihilation.

A tiny spider tries to wrap

an enormous wasp. Think of the spiderweb

woven across the cave where Muhammed slept.

There are love stories,

and there is obliteration into love.

You have been walking the ocean’s edge,

holding up your robes to keep them dry.

You must dive deeper under,

a thousand times deeper.

JUNE 14

Beyond Love Stories (2)

Love flows down. The ground

submits to the sky and suffers what comes.

Is the ground worse for giving in like that?

Do not put blankets over the drum.

Open completely.

Let your spirit ear listen

to the green dome’s passionate murmur.

Let the cords of your robe be untied.

Shiver in this new love

beyond all above and below.

The sun rises,

but which way does the night go?

I have no more words.

Let the soul speak

with the silent articulation of a face.

JUNE 15

The Wide Plain of Death

I placed one foot on the wide plain

of death, and some grand immensity

sounded on the emptiness.

I have felt nothing ever

like the wild wonder of that moment.

JUNE 16

Cuisine and Sex

You risk your life to feed desires,

yet you give your soul only short grazing spans,

and those grudgingly.

You borrow ten and repay fourteen.

Most of your decisions can be traced back

to cuisine and sex.

The fuel basket goes from one stokehole

to the next. Six friends hoist

your handsomeness and carry it

to the cemetery.

Food changes going from table to latrine.

You live between deaths,

thinking this is right enough.

Close these eyes to open the other.

Let the center brighten your sight.

JUNE 17

The King Inside

There are people with their eyes open

whose hearts are shut. What do they see? Matter.

But someone whose love is alert,

even if the eyes go to sleep,

he or she will be waking up thousands of others.

If you are not one of those light-filled lovers,

restrain your desire-body’s intensity.

Put limits on how much you eat

and how long you lie down.

But if you are awake here in the chest,

sleep long and soundly.

Your spirit will be out roaming and working,

even on the seventh level.

Muhammed says, I close my eyes and rest in sleep,

but my love never needs to rest.

The guard at the gate drowses.

The king stays awake. You have a king inside

who listens for what delights the soul.

That king’s wakefulness

cannot be described in a poem.

JUNE 18

Singing

When the soul first put on the body’s shirt,

the ocean lifted up all its gifts.

When love first tasted the lips

of being human, it started singing.

JUNE 19

Messengers from the Mystery

Love is the way

messengers from the mystery

tell us things.

Love is the mother.

We are her children.

She shines inside us,

visible-invisible, as we trust

or lose trust,

or feel it start to grow again.

JUNE 20

Dhu’l-Nun’s Instructive Madness

Some friends of Dhu’l-Nun, the Egyptian,

go to see him. They have heard

that he has gone spectacularly insane,

that he is a wildfire no one can contain,

this man who has been such a source of wisdom.

They arrive at his house. He yells out,

Hey, you had better watch out,

coming here. Who are you?

Don’t you remember us? We are your friends.

What secret are you hiding with this madness?

Dhu’l-Nun begins to rave a mixture of filthy language

and gibberish. He rushes out and grabs up stones

and throws them at the group. They run.

See, he calls. You are not friends.

A friend does not run from pain

inflicted by a friend.

There is a joy within suffering

that is the kernel of friendship.

A friend is pure gold singing

inside the refining fire. He thrives on fights

and misunderstandings and even madness.

JUNE 21

What the Friend Wants Done

One who does what the Friend wants done

will never need a friend.

There is a bankruptcy that is pure gain.

The moon stays bright

when it does not avoid the night.

A rose’s rarest essence

lives in the thorn.

JUNE 22

Behind Each Eye

Spring overall. But inside us

there is another unity.

Behind each eye

one glowing weather.

Every forest branch moves differently

in the breeze, but as they sway,

they connect at the roots.

JUNE 23

The Verge of Tears

You make our souls tasty like rose marmalade.

You cause us to fall flat on the ground

like the shadow of a cypress still growing at its tip.

Rainwater through a mountain forest,

we run after you in different ways.

We live like the verge of tears

inside your eyes. Don’t cry.

You trick some people with gold ropes.

You tie them up and leave them.

Others you pull near at dawn.

You are the one within every attraction.

All silence. You are not alone, never that.

But you must at times become distracted,

because look, you have taken the food

that you were going to give to Jesus,

you have taken that out to the stable

and put it down in front of the donkey.

JUNE 24

Inside This River

Inside this river there is a moon

which is not a reflection.

From the river bottom the moon speaks.

I travel in continuous conversation

with the river as it goes.

Whatever is above

and seemingly outside this river

is actually in it.

Merge with it, in here or out there,

as you please.

This is the river of rivers

and the beautiful silence of endless talking.

JUNE 25

The Miracle-Signs

Here are the miracle-signs you want,

that you cry through the night

and get up at dawn asking,

that in the absence of what you ask for,

your day gets dark, your neck thin

as a spindle, that what you give away

is all you own, that you sacrifice belongings,

sleep, health, your head,

that you often sit down in a fire like aloeswood

and often go out to meet a blade

like a battered helmet.

When acts of helplessness become habitual,

those are the signs.

Excuse my wandering.

How can one be orderly with this?

It is like counting leaves in a garden,

along with the song-notes of partridges

and crows. Sometimes organization

and computation become absurd.

JUNE 26

The Self We Share

Look fish, you are already in the ocean.

Just swimming there makes you friends with glory.

What are these grudges about?

You are Benjamin.

Joseph has put a gold cup in your grain sack

and accused you of being a thief.

Now he draws you aside and says,

You are my brother. I am a prayer. You are the Amen.

We move in eternal regions,

yet we worry about property here.

Let this be the prayer of each:

You are the source of my life.

You bring rivers from the mountain springs.

You brighten my eyes.

The wine you offer takes me out of myself

into the self we share.

Doing that is religion.

JUNE 27

An Invisible Bee

Look how desire has changed in you,

how light and colorless it is,

with the world growing new marvels

because of your changing.

Your soul has become an invisible bee.

We don’t see it working,

but there’s the full honeycomb.

Your body’s height, six feet or so,

but your soul rises through nine levels of sky.

A barrel corked with earth

and a raw wooden spile

keeps the oldest vineyard’s wine inside.

When I see you,

it is not so much your physical form,

but the company of two riders,

your pure-fire devotion and your love

for the one who teaches you.

Then the sun and moon on foot behind those.

JUNE 28

The Bright Core of Failure

Sometimes you enter the heart.

Sometimes you are born from the soul.

Sometimes you weep a song of separation.

It is all the same glory.

You live in beautiful forms,

and you are the energy that breaks form.

All light, neither this nor that.

Human beings go places on foot.

Angels, with wings.

Even if they find nothing but ruins

and failure, you are the bright core of that.

JUNE 29

A Great Rose Tree

This is the day and the year of the rose.

The whole garden is opening with laughter.

Iris whispering to cypress.

The rose is the joy of meeting someone.

The rose is a world imagination

cannot imagine, a messenger

from the orchard where the soul lives.

A small seed that points

to the great rose tree.

Hold its hand and walk like a child.

A rose is what grows from the work

the prophets do, full moon, new moon.

Accept the invitation spring extends,

four birds flying toward a master.

A rose is all these and the silence

that closes and sits in the shade, a bud.

JUNE 30

The Doctor Who Comes

In his dream an old man appeared.

Good king, I have news.

Tomorrow a stranger will come. I have sent him.

He is a physician you can trust.

Listen to him.

As dawn rose, the king was sitting

in the belvedere on his roof.

He saw someone coming, a person like the dawn.

He ran to meet this guest. Like swimmers

who love the water, their souls knit together

without being sewn, no seam.

The king opened his arms

and held the saintly doctor to him.

He led him to the head table.

At last I have found what patience can bring.

This one whose face answers any question,

who simply by looking can loosen

the knot of intellectual discussion.

Now Husam touches my arm.

He wants me to say more about Shams.

JULY

JULY 1

Stingy Aloeswood

Fear and hurt are lassoes

drawing you through a door.

Lord, Lord, you say weeping.

Green herbs sprout where those tears fall.

Dawn comes; blindness drains away.

Each day is eternity.

Do not avoid your suffering.

Plunge it into the Nile.

Purify your stubbornness.

Drown it. Burn it.

Your body is a stingy piece of aloeswood

that will not let go its healing power

until you put it in the fire.

Now Shams leans near to remind me,

That’s enough sourness. No more vinegar.

JULY 2

The Treasure’s Nearness

A man searching for spirit-treasure

cannot find it, so he is praying.

A voice inside says, You were given

the intuition to shoot an arrow

and then to dig where it landed,

but you shot with all your archery skill.

You were told to draw the bow

with only a fraction of your ability.

What you are looking for

is nearer than the big vein

on your neck. Let the arrow drop.

Do not exhaust yourself

like the philosophers who strain to shoot

the high arcs of their thought-arrows.

The more skill you use,

the farther you will be

from what your deepest love wants.

JULY 3

Surrender

Joseph is back.

And if you don’t feel in yourself

the freshness of Joseph,

be Jacob.

Weep, and then smile.

Do not pretend to know something

you have not experienced.

There is a necessary dying,

and then Jesus is breathing again.

Very little grows on jagged rock.

Be ground. Be crumbled,

so wildflowers will come up

where you are.

You have been stony for too many years.

Try something different. Surrender.

JULY 4

One Song

Every war and every conflict

between human beings has happened

because of some disaggreement about names.

It is such an unnecessary foolishness,

because just beyond the arguing

there is a long table of companionship

set and waiting for us to sit down.

What is praised is one, so the praise is one too,

many jugs being poured into a huge basin.

All religions, all this singing, one song.

The differences are just illusion and vanity.

Sunlight looks a little different

on this wall than it does on that wall

and a lot different on this other one,

but it is still one light.

We have borrowed these clothes,

these time-and-space personalites,

from a light, and when we praise,

we are pouring them back in.

JULY 5

The Tree of Awe

How does part of the world leave the world?

How can wetness leave water?

Don’t try to put out a fire by throwing on

more fire. Don’t wash a wound with blood.

No matter how fast you run, your shadow

more than keeps up. Sometimes it’s in front.

Only full, overhead sun diminishes your shadow.

But that shadow has been serving you.

What hurts you blesses you.

Darkness is your candle.

Your boundaries are your quest.

I can explain this, but it would break the glass cover

on your heart, and there is no fixing that.

You must have shadow and light source both.

Listen, and lay your head under the tree of awe.

When from that tree, feathers and wings

sprout on your soul, be quieter than a dove.

Don’t open your mouth for even a cooooo.

JULY 6

Emptiness

Now I return to the text,

  And He is with you,

  wherever you are.

                    (Qur’an 57:4)

But when have I ever left it?

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.

Who are we then

in this complicated world-tangle,

that is really just the single straight line

down at the beginning of ALLAH?

Nothing.

We are emptiness.

JULY 7

Birdsong from Inside the Egg

There is an excess

in spiritual searching

that is profound ignorance.

Let that ignorance be our teacher.

The Friend breathes into one

who has no breath.

A deep silence revives the listening

and the speaking of those two

who meet on the riverbank.

Like the ground turning green in a spring wind,

like birdsong beginning inside the egg.

Like this universe coming into existence,

the lover wakes, and whirls

in a dancing joy,

then kneels down

in praise.

JULY 8

The City of Saba (1)

In the city of Saba there is a glut of wealth.

Everyone has more than enough.

Even the bathstokers wear gold belts.

Huge grape clusters hang down on every street

and brush the faces of the citizens.

No one has to do anything.

You can balance an empty basket on your head,

and it will fill by itself

with overripe fruit dropping into it.

Stray dogs stray in lanes

full of thrown-out scraps with barely a notice.

The lean desert wolf gets indigestion

from the rich food. Everyone is

satiated with all the extra.

There are no robbers. There is no energy

for crime, or for gratitude.

And no one wonders about the unseen world.

JULY 9

The City of Saba (2)

The people of Saba feel bored

with just the mention of prophecy.

They have no desire of any kind. Maybe some

idle curiosity about miracles, but that’s it.

This over-richness is a subtle disease.

Those who have it are blind to what’s wrong,

and deaf to anyone who points it out.

The city of Saba cannot be understood

from within itself, but there is a cure,

an individual medicine, not a social remedy.

Sit quietly and listen for a voice

that will say, Be more silent.

As that happens, your soul starts to revive.

Give up talking, and your positions of power.

Give up the excessive money.

Turn toward the teachers and the prophets

who do not live in Saba. They will help you

grow sweet again, and fragrant and wild and fresh,

and thankful for any small event.

JULY 10

The Mystery of the Moment

To the mind there is such a thing as news,

whereas to the inner knowing, it is all

in the middle of its happening.

To doubters, this is a pain.

To believers, it’s gospel.

To the lover and the visionary,

it is life as it’s being lived.

JULY 11

The Essence of Ritual

Pray the prayer that is the essence

of every ritual. God, I have no hope.

I am torn to shreds. You are my first,

my last and only refuge.

Do not do daily prayers like a bird

pecking its head up and down.

Prayer is an egg.

Hatch out

the total helplessness inside.

JULY 12

Ramadan Silence

When the Ramadan banner flies,

soul restrains nature, so it can taste its own food.

The strength of horses and the intensity of fire,

these are the powers of sacrifice.

Fasting, we honor the guest. Clouds of courage

give rain, because it was in this month

that the Qur’an rained down,

light through an opening.

Grab the rope, and be lifted out

of the body’s pit.

Announce to Egypt that Joseph of Canaan

has come. Jesus dismounts the donkey,

and the sacrament table descends.

Wash your hands. Wash your face.

Do not eat or speak as you normally do.

Other food and other words will come in the silence.

JULY 13

Hoofbeats

The sound of hoofbeats leaving a monastery

where all is timed and measured.

You are that rider.

Someone who does not care very much about things

and results, illness and loss, you are the soul

inside the soul that is always traveling.

Mind gathers bait. Personality

carries a grudge. You weave cloth

like the moon leaving no trace on the road.

There is a learning community where the names of God

are talked about and memorized, and there is

another residence where meanings live.

You are on the way from here to there.

Your graceful manner gives color and fragrance

as creekwater animates the landscape it moves through.

The absolute unknowable appears as spring and disappears

in fall. Signs come, not the essence signified.

How long will you be a shepherd singlefiling us

in and out of the human barn. Will I ever see you

as you secretly are in silence?

JULY 14

You Are as You Are

You do not resemble anyone.

You are not the bride or the groom.

You do not fit in a house with anyone.

You have left the closed-in corner

where you lived. Domestic animals

get ridden to work. Not you.

You are as you are,

an indescribable message on the air.

JULY 15

Fierce Courtesy

The connection to the Friend

is secret and very fragile.

The image of the Friendship

is in how you love,

the grace and the delicacy,

the subtle talking together

in full prostration, outside of time.

When you are there,

remember the fierce courtesy

of the one with you.

JULY 16

Who Says Words with My Mouth

All day I think about it, then at night I say it.

Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing?

I have no idea. My soul is from elsewhere,

I am sure of that, and I intend to end up there.

This drunkenness began in some other tavern.

When I get back around to that place, I’ll be completely

sober. Meanwhile, I’m like a bird from another continent,

sitting in this aviary. The day is coming when I fly off,

but who is it now in my ear who hears my voice?

Who says words with my mouth?

Who looks out with my eyes? What is the soul?

I cannot stop asking. If I could taste one sip

of an answer, I could break out of this prison for drunks.

I didn’t come here of my own accord,

and I can’t leave that way.

Whoever brought me here will have to take me home.

This poetry. I never know what I’m going to say.

I don’t plan it. When I’m outside the saying of it,

I get very quiet and rarely speak at all.

Shams Tabriz, if you would show your face

to me again, I could flee the imposition of this life.

JULY 17

The Oldest Thirst There Is

Give us gladness that connects

with the Friend, a taste of the quick.

You that make a cypress strong

and jasmine jasmine.

Give us the inner listening

that is a way in itself

and the oldest thirst there is.

Do not measure it out with a cup.

I am a fish. You are the moon.

You cannot touch me, but your light

fills the ocean where I live.

JULY 18

Looking into the Creek

The way the soul is with the senses

and the mind, is like a creek.

When desire-weeds grow thick,

your intelligence cannot flow,

and soul-creatures stay hidden.

But sometimes a flooding comes

that runs so strong

it clears the clogged stream,

as though with God’s hand.

No longer weeping and frustrated,

your being grows as powerful

as your wantings were before.

Laughing and satisfied,

that masterful current

lets soul-creatures appear.

You look down,

and it’s lucid dreaming.

The gates made of light

swing open. You see in.

JULY 19

Love for Certain Work

Traveling is as refreshing for some

as staying at home is for others.

Solitude in a mountain place

fills with companionship for this one,

and weariness for that one.

This person loves being in charge

of the workings of a community.

This other one loves the ways

heated iron can be shaped with a hammer.

Each has been given a strong desire

for certain work, a love for those motions,

and all motion is love.

The way sticks and pieces of dead grass and leaves

shift about in the wind

and with the directions of rain and puddle-water

on the ground, those motions

are all following the love

they have been given.

JULY 20

People Want You to Be Happy

People want you to be happy.

Don’t keep serving them your pain.

If you could untie your wings

and free your soul of jealousy,

you and everyone around you

would fly up like doves.

JULY 21

It’s Afternoon

Speak quietly

and say nothing that is not true.

It’s afternoon. We need to be quiet

for a while. Speaking would be

such an orchard to walk in,

if we could do it without alphabet and sounds.

These stories and images and conversations

through which we try to show the inner life,

Husam and I,

they are like a donkey’s head

that we carry from the skinning pit

to the kitchen. Let further changes come.

I give word-shape to this poetry.

Husam supplies the essence.

No, that’s wrong. Both come from Husam,

Ziya-Haqq, the sun that is one

with earth and sky, one with intention and heart.

Husam, when my spirit completely recognizes yours,

they recall our being one.

JULY 22

Neither This nor That

I may be clapping my hands,

but I do not belong to a crowd of clappers.

I am neither this nor that. I am not part of a group

that loves flute music, or one that loves gambling,

or one that loves drinking wine.

Those who live in time, descended from Adam,

made of earth and water, I am not part of that.

Do not listen to what I say as though these words

came from an inside and went to an outside.

Your faces are very beautiful, but they are wooden cages.

You had better run from me. My words are fire.

I have nothing to do with being famous,

or with making grand judgments or feeling shame.

I borrow nothing. I do not want anything

from anybody. I flow through all human beings.

Love is my only companion.

When union happens, my speech goes inward,

toward Shams. At that meeting

the secrets of language are no longer secret.

JULY 23

Betrayal into Trust

When school and mosque and minaret

get torn down, then dervishes

can begin their community.

Not until faithfulness

turns to betrayal

and betrayal into trust

can any human being

become part of the truth.

JULY 24

Mirror and Face

We are the mirror as well as the face in it.

We are tasting the taste this minute

of eternity. We are pain

and what cures pain, both.

We are the sweet cold water

and the jar that pours.

JULY 25

Sky-Circles

The way of love is not

a subtle argument.

The door there

is devastation.

Birds make great sky-circles

of their freedom.

How do they learn that?

They fall, and falling,

they are given wings.

JULY 26

Fasting

There is a hidden sweetness in the stomach’s emptiness.

We are lutes, no more, no less. If the soundbox

is stuffed full of anything, no music comes.

But if brain and belly are burning clean

with fasting, every moment a new song

comes out of the fire.

The fog clears and new energy

makes you run up the steps in front of you.

Be emptier, and cry like reed instruments cry.

Emptier, write secrets with the reed pen.

When you are full of food and drink, an ugly metal

statue sits where your spirit should. When you fast,

good habits gather like friends who want to help.

Fasting is Solomon’s ring. Don’t give it

to some illusion and lose your power, but even if you have,

if you have lost all will and control,

they come back when you fast, like soldiers appearing

out of the ground, pennants flying above them.

A table descends to your tents, Jesus’ table.

Expect to see it when you fast, this table spread

with other food, better than the broth of cabbages.

JULY 27

The Face

So the frowning teacher came and left.

He is very consistent with that vinegar face.

But maybe he shows that to us and smiles with others.

Such a beautiful teacher, but so sour.

He is a pure standard for tartness.

Consider how your face is a source of light.

If you enter a grieving room

with the Friend in your eyes,

light will bloom there

according to the laws of sweet and sour.

Locked in a cell, you grow bitter, but out walking

in morning sunlight with friends,

how does that taste?

There are exceptions. Joseph caught the rose

fragrance down in his abandoned wellhole.

In this quietness now

I feel someone seated on my right

like a kindness that will never leave.

JULY 28

A Frog Deep in the Presence

Since you have left, death draws us in.

A fish quivers on rough sand until its soul leaves.

For those of us still living, the grave

feels like an escape-hole back to the ocean.

This is no small thing, the pulling of a part

back into the whole. Muhammad used to weep

for his native land. To children who do not know

where they are from, Istanbul and Yemen

are similar. They want their nurses.

Stars go out to graze in the night sky pasture

in the same way that animals love the ground.

When I close my mouth, this poetry stops,

but a frog deep in the presence

cannot keep his mouth closed.

He breathes and the sound comes.

A mystic cannot hide his breathing light-burst.

I reach this point, and the pen breaks,

as Sinai once split open

for the generosity it was given.

JULY 29

A Cleared Site

The presence rolling through again

clears the shelves and shuts down shops.

Friend of the soul, enemy of the soul,

why do you want mine?

Bring tribute from the village.

But the village is gone in your flood.

That cleared site is what I want.

Live in the opening where there is no door

to hide behind. Be pure absence.

In that state everything is essential.

The rest of this must be said in silence

because of the enormous difference

between light and the words

that try to say light.

JULY 30

The Source of Joy

No one knows

what makes the soul wake up so happy.

Maybe a dawn breeze has blown the veil

from the face of God.

A thousand new moons appear.

Roses open laughing.

Hearts become perfect rubies

like those from Badakshan.

The body turns entirely spirit.

Leaves become branches in this wind.

Why is it now so easy to surrender,

even for those already surrendered?

There is no answer to any of this.

No one knows the source of joy.

A poet breathes into a reed flute,

and the tip of every hair makes music.

Shams sails down clods of dirt from the roof,

and we take jobs as doorkeepers for him.

JULY 31

The Soul’s Friend

Listen to your essential self, the Friend.

When you feel longing, be patient,

and also prudent, moderate with eating and drinking.

Be like a mountain in the wind.

Do you notice how little it moves?

There are sweet illusions that arrive

to lure you away. Make some excuse to them.

I have indigestion, or I need to meet my cousin.

You fish, the baited hook may be fifty

or even sixty gold pieces, but is it really worth

your freedom in the ocean?

When traveling, stay close to your bag.

I am the bag that holds what you love.

You can be separated from me.

Live carefully in the joy of this friendship.

Don’t think, But those others love me so.

Some invitations sound like the fowler’s whistle

to the quail, friendly,

but not quite how you remember

the call of your soul’s Friend.

AUGUST

AUGUST 1

Like Light over This Plain

A moth flying into the flame

says with its wingfire, Try this.

The wick with its knotted neck broken

tells you the same. A candle as it diminishes explains,

Gathering more and more is not the way.

Burn, become light and heat and help. Melt.

The ocean sits in the sand letting its lap

fill with pearls and shells, then empty.

A bittersalt taste hums, This.

The rose purifies its face, drops the soft petals,

shows its thorn, and points.

Wine abandons thousands of famous names,

the vintage years and delightful bouquets,

to run wild and anonymous through your brain.

The flute closes its eyes and gives its lips

to Hamza’s emptiness.

Everything begs with the silent rocks

for you to be flung out like light

over this plain, the presence of Shams.

AUGUST 2

Inside

Inside a lover’s heart

there is another world,

and yet another.

AUGUST 3

Sour, Doughy, Raw, and Numb

If we are not together in the heart,

what’s the point?

When body and soul are not dancing,

there is no pleasure in colorful clothing.

Why have cooking pans

if there is no food in the house?

In this world full of fresh bread,

amber, and musk, what are they

to someone with no sense of smell?

If you stay away from fire,

you will remain sour,

doughy, raw, and numb.

You may have lovely just-baked loaves

around you, but those friends cannot help.

You have to feel the oven fire yourself.

AUGUST 4

This Overflow

I could not have known what love is

if I had never felt this longing.

Anything done to excess

becomes boring except this overflow

that moves toward you.

AUGUST 5

Value

Which is worth more, a crowd of thousands,

or your own genuine solitude?

Freedom, or power over an entire nation?

A little while alone in your room

will prove more valuable than anything else

that could ever be given you.

AUGUST 6

The Great Untying

We search this world for the great untying

of what was wed to us at birth

and gets undone at dying.

We sleep beside a stream, thirsty.

Cursed and unlucky his whole life,

an old man finishes up in a niche

of a ruin, inches from the treasure.

AUGUST 7

The Sacred Liquid

Are you jealous of the ocean’s generosity?

Why would you refuse to give

this gift to anyone?

Fish don’t hold the sacred liquid in cups.

They swim the huge fluid freedom.

AUGUST 8

Lion of the Heart

You that come to birth and bring the mysteries,

your voice-thunder makes us very happy.

Roar, lion of the heart,

and tear me open.

AUGUST 9

A Way of Passing Away

There is a way of passing away

from the personal, a dying

that makes one plural, no longer single.

A gnat lights in the buttermilk

to become nourishment for many.

Your soul is like that, Husam.

Hundreds of thousands of impressions

from the invisible world are eagerly wanting

to come through you. I get dizzy with the abundance.

When life is this dear, it means the source

is pulling us. Freshness comes from there.

We are given the gift of continuously dying

and being resurrected, ocean within ocean.

AUGUST 10

Out of Stillness

I was happy enough to stay still

inside the pearl inside the shell,

but the hurricane of experience

lashed me out of hiding

and made me a wave moving into shore,

saying loudly the ocean’s secret

as I went, and then, spent there,

I slept like fog against the cliff,

another stillness.

AUGUST 11

Our Caravan Bell

Do you hear what the violin says

about longing? The same as the stick.

I was once a green branch in the wind.

We are all far from home.

Language is our caravan bell.

Do not stop anywhere.

The moment you are attracted to a place,

you grow bored with it.

Think of the big moves you have already made,

from a single cell to a human being.

Stay light-footed and keep moving.

Turkish, Arabic, Greek, any tongue

is a wind that was formerly water.

As a breeze carries the ocean inside it,

so within every sentence is,

Return to the source.

A moth does not avoid flame.

The king lives in the city.

AUGUST 12

Light Building in the Pupil

Birdcatcher, the birds you want are thirsty,

so you open the wine vat and let the fragrance draw us.

This is the wine the magi brought as a gift,

and the wine musk that led them.

There are certain night-wanderers

that you especially want. Not the drunkards,

and not the ones who just carry cups to others.

This is how it is to come near you.

A wave of light builds in the black pupil

of the eye. The old become young.

The opening lines of the Qur’an open still more.

Inside every human chest is a hand, but it has nothing

to write with. Love moves further in where

language turns to fresh cream on the tongue.

Every accident, and the essence of every being,

is a bud, a blanket

tucked into a cradle, a closed mouth.

All these buds will blossom.

In that moment you will know what your grief was,

and how the seed you planted has been miraculously growing.

AUGUST 13

The Circle

Nothing is better than selling figs

to the fig seller. That’s how this is.

Making a profit is not why we’re here,

nor pleasure, nor even joy.

When someone is a goldsmith,

wherever he goes he asks for the goldsmith.

Wheat stays wheat right through the threshing.

How would the soul feel

in the beloved’s river?

Like fish washed free and clean of fear.

You drive us away,

but we return like pigeons.

Shahabuddin Osmond joins the circle.

We will say this poem again

so he can play.

There is no end to anything round.

AUGUST 14

The Polisher

As everything changes overnight,

I praise the breaking of promises.

Whatever love wants, it gets,

not next year, now.

I swear by the one who never says tomorrow,

as the circle of the moon never agrees

to sell installments of light.

It gives all it has.

How do stories end?

Who shall explain them?

Every story is us. That is who we are,

from the beginning to no-matter-how-it-comes-out.

Those who know the taste of a meal

are those who sit at the table and eat.

Lover and friend are one being,

and separate beings too,

as the polisher melts in the mirror’s face.

AUGUST 15

Gnostic Donkeys (1)

I am a cup in the Friend’s hand.

Look in my eyes. The one who holds me

is none of this, but this that is so filled

with images belongs to that one who is without form,

who knows what is best for a sandgrain

or a drop of water, who opens

and closes our ability to love.

We are being taught like a donkey.

A donkey thinks whoever brings hay is God.

In the same way, we are gnostics,

each with a unique experience

of what binds and what releases us.

We hear the voice of that and our ears

twitch like the donkey who hears his trainer.

Oats may be coming, and water!

What have you been given that is like that?

Confinement, you complain. Stick your head out.

That is all that will fit through

the five-sense opening.

AUGUST 16

Gnostic Donkeys (2)

So. You have a wonderful view,

but no way into the prospect.

I have no wings, you mutter, depressed,

but this looking outside the senses

is a fire that kindles the body.

Small sticks and dry grasses catch

to a burning light, and here

is an odd bit: Even if not on fire

and shining, the sticks are still light.

To those who will come after, I say,

Life is not for waiting.

Do not postpone.

Love is bringing everyone by the ear

to a place where reason cannot go,

where Muhammed’s eyes close in sleep,

and the night grows quiet.

Truth does not sleep. Sunlight does not go away.

The stars are suns. Shams is everywhere.

AUGUST 17

The Mystery of Presence

The mystery of presence

will not arrive through the mind,

but do some physical work, and it comes clear.

An intellectual gets bound and wrapped

in complicated nets of connectedness.

Whereas the Friend rides the intelligence

that is creating genius at the center.

The mind is husk, and the appetites love coverings.

They look for them everywhere.

That which loves the kernel and the oil

inside the nut has no interest in shells.

Mind carries reams of reasons into court,

but universal awareness does not move a step

without some definite intuition.

One covers volumes of pages.

The other fills the horizon with light and color.

The value of scrip resides in gold

stored somewhere else. The value of a body

stems from the soul. The value of soul

derives from presence. Soul cannot live

without a connection there.

AUGUST 18

The Arrow

There is a hand hidden in the pen’s writing,

a rider invisible in a horse’s dancing about.

We see the arrow’s flight, but not the bow,

what is manifest, not the source.

But don’t discard the arrow.

Notice the royal markings.

We are the confused polo ball

that does not see the bat’s arc coming down.

A tailor tears out seams and sews again.

A blacksmith blows on the fire.

In one moment a saint forgets.

In another, a degenerate begins a forty-day fast.

AUGUST 19

More Range

We are friends with the one who kills us,

who gives us to the ocean waves.

We love this death. Only ignorance says,

Put it off awhile, day after tomorrow.

Do not avoid the knife.

This friend only seems fierce,

bringing your soul more range,

perching your falcon on a cliff of the wind.

Jesus on his cross, Hallaj on his.

Those absurd executions hold a secret.

Cautious cynics claim they know

what they are doing every minute, and why.

Submit to love without thinking,

as the sun rose this morning

recklessly extinguishing

our star-candle minds.

AUGUST 20

Inward Sky (1)

You are the soul, the universe,

and what animates the universe.

I live and work inside you. I speak with

what was found in the ruins of a former self.

Concealed in your garden, I have become a ladder

propped against and leading up into the sky-dome.

Why cry for what is closer than voice?

I ask to hear the wisdom that uncovers the soul.

These four come with their answers.

Fire: You have a saucepan to cook what’s raw.

    Wear it like a saddle on your back.

Water: You have a spring inside.

    Soak the earth.

Jupiter in its goodluck aspect: Show your talent.

Do something outside of time and space.

Jupiter in its bad mood: Be consumed with jealousy.

What else is there?

AUGUST 21

Inward Sky (2)

Prophets come and go for one reason, to say,

Human beings, you have a great value

inside your form, a seed. Be led

by the rose inside the rose.

Doubt is part of existence.

There is no proof of the soul.

So I ask in this talking with soul,

this prayer, this kindness, When the soul

leaves my body, where will these poems be?

Answer: It was like that in the beginning, so what are you worrying about?

Love, finish this ghazal, please.

You know which words will last.

Shams, say the meaning of the names,

the inward sky that you are.

AUGUST 22

The Cat and the Meat (1)

There was once a sneering wife

who ate all her husband brought home

and lied about it.

One day it was some lamb for a guest

who was to come. He had worked two hundred days

in order to buy that meat.

When he was away, his wife cooked a kabob

and ate it all, with wine.

The husband returns with his guest.

The cat has eaten the meat, she says.

Buy more, if you have any money left.

He asks a servant to bring the scales

and the cat. The cat weighs three pounds.

The meat was three pounds, one ounce.

If this is the cat, where is the meat?

If this is the meat, where is the cat?

Start looking for one or the other.

AUGUST 23

The Cat and the Meat (2)

If you have a body, where is the spirit?

If you are spirit, what is the body?

This is not our problem to worry about.

Both are both. Corn is corn grain

and cornstalk. The divine butcher

cuts us a piece from the thigh

and a piece from the neck.

Invisible, visible, the world

does not work without both.

If you throw dust at someone’s head,

nothing will happen.

If you throw water, nothing.

But combine them into a lump.

That marriage of water and earth

cracks open the head,

and afterward there are other marriages.

AUGUST 24

The Breeze at Dawn

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.

        Don’t go back to sleep.

You must ask for what you really want.?

        Don’t go back to sleep.

People are going back and forth across the doorsill

        where the two worlds touch.

The door is round and open.

        Don’t go back to sleep.

AUGUST 25

On the Day I Die

On the day I die,

when I am being carried toward the grave,

don’t weep. Don’t say, He’s gone. He’s gone.

Death has nothing to do with going away.

The sun sets and the moon sets,

but they’re not gone.

Death is a coming together.

The tomb looks like a prison,

but it’s really release into union.

The human seed goes down into the ground

like a bucket into the well where Joseph is.

It grows and comes up

full of some unimagined beauty.

Your mouth closes here

and immediately opens

with a shout of joy there.

AUGUST 26

Longing

Longing is the core of mystery.

Longing itself brings the cure.

The only rule is, Suffer the pain.

Your desire must be disciplined,

and what you want to happen

in time, sacrificed.

AUGUST 27

Whatever Gives Pleasure

Whatever gives pleasure

is the fragrance of the Friend.

Whatever makes us wonder

comes from that light.

What is inside the ground

begins to sprout

because you spilled wine there.

What dies in autumn comes up in spring,

because this way of saying no

becomes in spring your praise-song, yes.

AUGUST 28

The Death of Saladin

You left ground and sky weeping,

mind and soul full of grief.

No one can take your place in existence,

or in absence. Both mourn, the angels, the prophets,

and this sadness I feel has taken from me

the taste of language, so that I cannot say

the flavor of my being apart.

The roof of the kingdom within has collapsed.

When I say the word you, I mean a hundred universes.

Pouring grief water or secret dripping

in the heart, eyes in the head,

or eyes of the soul, I saw yesterday

that all these flow out to find you

when you’re not here.

That bright firebird Saladin

went like an arrow,

and now the bow trembles and sobs.

If you know how to weep

for human beings, weep for Saladin.

AUGUST 29

Harsh Evidence

What sort of person says that he or she

wants to be polished and pure,

then complains about being handled roughly?

Love is a lawsuit

where harsh evidence must be brought in.

To settle the case,

the judge must hear details.

You have heard that every buried treasure

has a snake guarding it.

Kiss the snake to discover the treasure.

AUGUST 30

You Are Most Handsome

Think that you’re gliding out

from the face of a cliff like an eagle.

Think that you’re walking like a tiger walks

by himself in the forest.

You are most handsome when you are after food.

Spend less time with nightingales and peacocks.

One is just a voice, the other just a color.

AUGUST 31

Entering the Shell

Love is alive,

and someone borne along by it is more alive

than lions roaring or men in their fierce courage.

Bandits ambush others on the road.

They get wealth, but they stay in one place.

Lovers keep moving, never the same,

not for a second.

What makes others grieve, they enjoy.

When they look angry, do not believe their faces.

It is like spring lightning, a joke before the rain.

They chew thorns thoughtfully,

along with pasture grass.

Gazelle and lioness having dinner.

Love is invisible except here, in us.

Sometimes I praise love. Sometimes love praises me.

Love, a little shell somewhere

on the ocean floor, opens its mouth.

You and I and we, those imaginary beings,

enter the shell as a single drop of water.

SEPTEMBER

SEPTEMBER 1

We Three

My love wanders the rooms, melodious,

flute notes, plucked wires,

full of a wine the magi drank

on the way to Bethlehem.

We are three. The moon comes

from its quiet corner, puts a pitcher

of water down in the center.

The circle of surface flames.

One of us kneels to kiss the threshold-dust.

One drinks with wine-flames playing over his face.

One watches the gathering

and says to any cold onlookers,

     This dance is the joy of existence.

SEPTEMBER 2

Put This Design in Your Carpet (1)

Spiritual experience is a modest woman

who looks lovingly at only one man.

It is a great river where ducks

live happily, and crows drown.

The visible bowl of form contains food

that is both nourishing and a source of heartburn.

There is an unseen presence we honor

that gives the gifts.

You are water. We are the millstone.

You are wind. We are dust blown up into shapes.

You are spirit. We’re the opening and closing

of our hands. You are the clarity.

We are this language that tries to say it.

You are joy. We are all the different kinds of laughing.

SEPTEMBER 3

Put This Design in Your Carpet (2)

Any movement or sound is a profession of faith,

as the millstone grinding is explaining

how it believes in the river.

No metaphor can explain this,

but I cannot stop pointing to the beauty.

Every moment and place says,

Put this design in your carpet.

I want to be in such a passionate adoration

that my tent gets pitched against the sky.

Let the beloved come

and sit like a guard dog

in front of the tent.

When the ocean surges,

don’t let me just hear it.

Let it splash inside my chest.

SEPTEMBER 4

This Fish Way

The ocean way is this fish way

of the watersouls of fish who die becoming the sea.

Fish do not wait patiently for water.

In this world full of shape,

there you are with no form.

You have made a universe

from a drop of my blood.

Now I am confused.

I cannot tell world from drop.

My mouth and this wine glass are one lip.

I am Nobody, the fool shepherd.

Where is my flock? What shepherd?

When I talk of you, there are no words.

Where could I put you, who will not fit

in the secret world, or in this one?

All I know of spirit is this love.

Do not call me a believer.

Infidel is better.

SEPTEMBER 5

That Quick

A lover looks at creekwater

and wants to be that quick to fall,

to kneel all the way down in full prostration.

A lover wants to die of his love

like a man with dropsy who knows

that water will kill him, but he cannot deny

his thirst. A lover loves death,

which is God’s way of helping us evolve

from mineral to vegetable to animal,

each onward form incorporating the others.

Then the animal becomes Adam,

and the next stage will take us beyond

what we can imagine into the mystery

of We are all returning.

Do not fear death. Spill your jug into the river.

Your attributes will disappear,

but the essence moves on.

Your shame and fear are like felt layers

covering coldness. Throw them off

and rush naked into the joy of death.

SEPTEMBER 6

The Generations I Praise

Yesterday the beauty of early dawn

came over me, and I wondered

who my heart would reach toward.

Then this morning again

and you. Who am I?

Wind and fire and watery ground

move me mightily because they are pregnant

with God. These are the early morning

generations I praise.

SEPTEMBER 7

Something Opens Our Wings

Something opens our wings. Something

makes boredom and hurt disappear.

Someone fills the cup in front of us.

We taste only sacredness.

SEPTEMBER 8

Hunt Music

Musk and amber remind us

of the air at sunrise,

when any small motion seems part

of some elaborate making.

The body’s harp gets handed

to the soul to play.

The strings: rage, jealousy,

all the wantings mix their energy-music.

Who tuned this instrument?

Where wind is a string

and also Shams’ eyes

reflecting a gazelle as it turns

to stalk the hunting lioness.

SEPTEMBER 9

No Better Love

No better love than love with no object.

No more satisfying work

than work with no purpose.

If you could give up tricks and cleverness,

that would be the cleverest trick.

SEPTEMBER 10

The Origin of the World

Human beings seem to derive

from this planet, but essentially

we are the origin of the world.

A tiny gnat’s outward form

flies about in pain and wanting,

while the gnat’s inward nature

includes the entire galactic

whirling of the universe.

SEPTEMBER 11

Dance

Dance, when you’re broken open.

Dance, if you’ve torn the bandage off.

Dance in the middle of the fighting.

Dance in your blood.

Dance, when you are perfectly free.

SEPTEMBER 12

For Us This Day

My soul keeps whispering, Quickly,

be a wandering dervish,

a salamander sitting in its homefire.

Walk about watching the burning

turn to roses. As this love-secret

we are both blasphemy and the core of Islam.

Do not wait. The open plain is better

than any closing door. Ravens love ruins

and cemetery trees. They cannot help but fly there.

But for us this day is friends sitting together

with silence shining in our faces.

SEPTEMBER 13

Only the Best

In the slaughterhouse of love

they kill only the best,

none of the weak or deformed.

Do not run away from this dying.

Whoever is not killed for love is dead meat.

SEPTEMBER 14

Sublime Generosity (1)

I was dead, then alive.

Weeping, then laughing.

The power of love came into me,

and I became fierce like a lion,

then tender like the evening star.

He said, You are not mad enough.

You don’t belong in this house.

I went wild and had to be tied up.

He said, Still not wild enough to stay with us.

I broke through another layer into joyfulness.

He said, It is not enough. I died.

He said, You are a clever little man

full of fantasy and doubting.

I plucked out my feathers and became a fool.

He said, Now you are the candle for this assembly.

But I’m no candle. Look. I’m scattered smoke.

SEPTEMBER 15

Sublime Generosity (2)

He said, You are the sheikh, the guide.

But I am not a teacher. I have no power.

He said, You already have wings.

I cannot give you wings.

But I wanted his wings.

I felt like some flightless chicken.

Then new events said to me,

Don’t move. A sublime generosity

is coming toward you.

And old love said, Stay with me.

I said, I will.

You are the fountain of the sun’s light.

I am a willow shadow on the ground.

You make my raggedness silky.

SEPTEMBER 16

Different Loads

Do not feed both sides of yourself equally.

The spirit and the body carry different loads

and require different attentions.

Too often we put saddlebags on Jesus,

and let the donkey run loose in the pasture.

Do not make the body do what the spirit does best,

and don’t put a big load on the spirit

that the body could carry easily.

SEPTEMBER 17

Sheba’s Hesitation

Imagine that you are Sheba trying to decide

whether or not to go to Solomon.

You are haggling about how much to pay

for shoeing a donkey, when you could be seated

with one who is always in union with God,

who carries a beautiful garden inside himself.

You could be moving in a great circuit

without wings, nourished without eating,

sovereign without a throne.

No longer subject to fortune,

you could be luck itself,

if you would rise from sleep,

leave the market-arguing, and learn

that your own essence is your wealth.

SEPTEMBER 18

Too Happy, You Could Not Sleep Last Night

I am the slave who frees the master.

I teach the teacher.

I am essence born freshly every day.

I built the ancient civilizations.

I brush medicine on fading eyesight.

I relight intelligence.

In grief, I am pitchblack darkness.

On a feast day, the children’s excitement.

I am the ground who fills the sky’s brain

with fiery lightning-love, air, wind.

You could not sleep last night,

too happy with how I was remembering you.

No one is to blame that sometimes

I am a scandal, or obviously unfair.

The surface is rusting over.

I had better go into silence.

I am breathing too close

to this mirror’s face.

SEPTEMBER 19

Meadowsounds

We have come again to that knee of seacoast

no ocean can reach.

Tie together all human intellects.

They will not stretch to here.

The sky bears its neck so beautifully,

but gets no kiss. Only a taste.

This is the food that everyone wants,

wandering the wilderness.

Please give us your manna and quail.

We are here again with the beloved. This air,

a shout. These meadowsounds, an astonishing myth.

We have come into the presence of the one

who was never apart from us. When someone chews

sugarcane, he is wanting this sweetness.

Inside this globe the soul roars like thunder.

And now silence, my strict tutor.

I will not try to talk about Shams.

Language cannot touch that presence.

SEPTEMBER 20

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.

SEPTEMBER 21

Deliberation (1)

A friend remarks to the prophet, Why is it

I always make bad business deals?

It’s like a spell. I become distracted

by business talk and get led into wrong decisions.

Muhammad replies, Stipulate with every transaction

that you need three days to make sure.

Deliberation is one of the qualities of God.

Throw a dog a bit of something.

He sniffs to see if he wants it.

Be that careful. Sniff with your wisdom-nose.

Get clear. Then decide.

The universe came into being gradually

over six days. God could have just commanded, BE.

Little by little a person reaches forty

and fifty and sixty and feels more complete.

God could have thrown full-blown prophets

flying through the cosmos in an instant.

Jesus said one word, and a dead man sat up,

but creation usually unfolds like calm breakers.

SEPTEMBER 22

Deliberation (2)

Constant slow movement teaches us

to keep working like a small creek that stays clear,

that does not stagnate,

but finds a way through numerous

details, deliberately.

Deliberation is born of joy

like a bird from an egg.

Birds do not resemble eggs.

Think how different the hatching out is.

A white leathery snake egg, a sparrow’s egg,

a quince seed, an apple seed.

Very different things look similar at one stage.

These leaves, our bodily personalities,

seem identical, but the globe

of soul fruit we make,

each is elaborately

unique.

SEPTEMBER 23

The Far Mosque

The place that Solomon made to worship in,

called the Far Mosque, is not built of earth

and water and stone, but of intention and wisdom

and mystical conversation and compassionate action.

Every part of it is intelligent and responsive

to every other. The carpet bows to the broom.

The door knocker and the door swing together

like musicians. This heart sanctuary

does exist, though it cannot be described.

Solomon goes there every morning

and gives guidance with words,

with musical harmonies, and in actions,

which are the deepest teaching.

A prince is just a conceit,

until he does something with his generosity.

SEPTEMBER 24

A Basket of Fresh Bread (1)

If you want to learn theory,

talk with theoreticians. That way is oral.

When you learn a craft, practice it.

That learning comes through the hands.

If you want dervishhood, spiritual poverty,

and emptiness, you must be friends with a sheikh.

Talking about it, reading books, and doing practices

do not help. Soul receives from soul that knowing.

The mystery of spiritual emptiness

may be living in a pilgrim’s heart,

but the knowing of it might not yet be his.

Wait for the illuminating openness,

as though your chest were filling with light.

Do not look for it outside yourself.

There is a milk fountain inside of you.

Do not walk around with an empty bucket.

You have a channel into the ocean,

yet you ask for water from a little pool.

Beg for the love-expansion.

The Qur’an says, And He is with you. (57:4)

SEPTEMBER 25

A Basket of Fresh Bread (2)

There is a basket of fresh bread on your head,

yet you go door to door asking for crusts.

Knock on the inner door. No other.

Sloshing knee-deep in clear streamwater,

you keep wanting a drink from other people’s waterbags.

Water is everywhere around you,

but you see only barriers that keep you from water.

A horse is moving beneath the rider’s thighs,

yet still he asks, Where is my horse?

Right there, under you. Yes, this is a horse,

but where’s the horse? Can’t you see? Yes,

I can see, but whoever saw such a horse?

Mad with thirst, he cannot drink from the stream

running so close by his face.

He is like a pearl on the deep bottom

wondering, inside the shell, Where is the ocean?

His mental questionings form the barrier.

His physical eyesight bandages his knowing.

Self-consciousness plugs his ears.

Stay bewildered in God and only that.

SEPTEMBER 26

Childhood Friends (1)

A close childhood friend came once to visit Joseph.

They had shared all the secrets that children

tell each other when they are lying on their pillows

at night before they go to sleep. These two

were completely truthful with each other.

The friend asked, What was it like when you realized

that your brothers were jealous and what they planned to do?

I felt like a lion with a chain around his neck,

not degraded by the chain, and not complaining,

just waiting for my power to be recognized.

How about down in the well, and in prison,

how was it then? Like the moon when it is

getting smaller, yet knowing the fullness to come.

Like a seed pearl ground in the mortor for medicine

that knows it will now be the light in a human eye.

Like a wheat grain that breaks open in the ground,

then grows and gets harvested, then crushed

in the mill for flour, baked and then crushed again

between teeth to become a person’s understanding.

Lost in love, like the songs the planters sing

the night after they sow the seed.

SEPTEMBER 27

Childhood Friends (2)

Then Joseph began questioning his friend,

What have you brought me? You know a traveler

should not arrive empty-handed at the door

of a friend like me. That is like going

to the grinding stone without your wheat.

God will ask at the resurrection, Did you bring me

a present? Did you think you wouldn’t see me?

Joseph keeps teasing, Let’s have it.

I want my gift.

The guest began, You cannot imagine

how I have looked for something for you.

Nothing seemed appropriate. You don’t take gold

down into a goldmine, or a drop of water

to the Sea of Oman. Everything I thought of

was like bringing cumin seed to Kirmanshah

where cumin comes from. You have all seeds

in your barn. You even have my love

and my soul, so I cannot bring those.

I have brought you a mirror.

Look at yourself and remember me.

SEPTEMBER 28

Childhood Friends (3)

He took the mirror from his robe

where he was hiding it.

What is the mirror of being? Non-being?

Always bring a mirror of non-existence as a gift.

Any other present is foolish.

Let the poor man look deep into generosity.

Let bread see a hungry man.

Let kindling behold a spark from the flint.

An empty mirror and your worst destructive habits,

when they are held up to each other, that is when

the real making begins. That’s what art and crafting are.

A tailor needs a torn garment to practice his expertise.

The trunks of trees must be cut and cut again,

so they can be used for fine carpentry.

Your doctor must have a broken leg to doctor.

Your defects are the ways that glory gets manifested.

Whoever sees clearly what is diseased in himself

begins to gallop on the way. There is nothing worse

than thinking you are well enough. More than anything,

self-complacency blocks the workmanship.

SEPTEMBER 29

Childhood Friends (4)

Put your vileness up to a mirror and weep.

Get that self-satisfaction flowing out of you.

Satan thought, I am better than Adam,

and that better than is still strongly in us.

Your streamwater may look clean,

but there is unstirred matter on the bottom.

Your guide can dig a side channel

that will drain that waste off.

Trust your wound to a teacher’s surgery.

Flies collect on a wound. They cover it,

those flies of your self-protecting feelings,

your love for what you think is yours.

Let a teacher wave away the flies

and put a plaster on your wound.

Don’t turn your head. Keep looking

at the bandaged place.

That is where the light enters you.

And don’t believe for a moment

you are healing yourself.

SEPTEMBER 30

A Trace

You that give new life to this planet,

you that transcend logic, come.

I am only an arrow. Fill your bow with me

and let fly. Because of this love for you,

my bowl has fallen from the roof.

Put down a ladder and collect the pieces.

People ask, Which roof is your roof?

I answer, Wherever the soul came from

and wherever it goes back to at night,

my roof is in that direction.

From wherever spring arrives

to heal the ground, from wherever searching rises

in a human being. The looking itself is a trace

of what we are looking for.

But we have been more like the man

who sat on his donkey and asked the donkey where to go.

Be quiet now and wait. It may be the ocean one,

the one we want so to move into and become,

it may be that one wants us out here

on land a little longer

going our sundry roads to the shore.

*Rumi’s birthday, in 1207.

OCTOBER

OCTOBER 1

No Room for Form (1)

On the night when you cross the street

from your shop and your house to the cemetery,

you will hear me hailing you from inside

the open grave, and you will realize

how we have always been together.

I am the clear consciousness-core

of your being, the same in ecstasy

as in self-hating fatigue.

That night, when you escape the fear of snakebite

and all irritation with the ants,

you will hear my familiar voice,

see the candle being lit,

smell the incense, the surprise meal

fixed by the lover inside all your other lovers.

This heart-tumult is my signal

to you igniting in the tomb.

So don’t fuss with the shroud

and the graveyard road dust.

Those get ripped open and washed away

in the music of our finally meeting.

OCTOBER 2

No Room for Form (2)

And don’t look for me in a human shape.

I am inside your looking. No room

for form with love this strong.

Beat the drum and let the poets speak.

This is a day of purification for those

who are already mature and initiated

into what love is.

No need to wait until we die.

There is more to want here than money

and being famous and bites of roasted meat.

Now, what shall we call this new sort of gazing-house

that has opened in our town where people sit

quietly and pour out their glancing

like light, like answering?

OCTOBER 3

Out Beyond

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,

there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,

the world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, language, even the phrase each other

doesn’t make any sense.

OCTOBER 4

This Dove Here

Someone who does not run

toward the allure of love

walks a road where nothing lives.

But this dove here

senses the love-hawk floating above,

and waits, and will not be driven

or scared to safety.

OCTOBER 5

Hoping to Be More Alive

You are an ocean in a drop of dew,

all the universes in a thin sack of blood.

What are these pleasures then,

these joys, these worlds

that you keep reaching for,

hoping they will make you more alive?

OCTOBER 6

Goldsmithing

By Saladin’s shop suddenly

I hear the music of gold

being hammered, gold and God.

As gold thins out,

the presence becomes a sheer

goldleaf light

on this goldbeater’s face,

in his eyes as he works.

As the love-secret of Jacob

becomes Joseph’s smile,

as lovers leave what keeps them confined,

as Job’s patience dissolves to nothing,

you are the Friend

coming toward this touching.

You are the soul.

Be that, and when you hear yourself

in some hypocrisy,

cut free. Quickly, cut.

*This poem records the moment in Konya when Rumi heard an inner music in the goldbeater’s hammering coming from his friend Saladin’s shop. The legend is that he began spontanously turning in the street in response to the music of existence.

OCTOBER 7

Water from Your Spring

What was in that candle’s light

that opened and consumed me so quickly?

Come back, my friend. The form of our love

is not a created form.

Nothing can help me but that beauty.

There was a dawn I remember

when my soul heard something from your soul.

I drank water from your spring

and felt the current take me.

OCTOBER 8

Walnuts

Philosophers have said that we love music

because it resembles the sphere-sounds of union.

We have been part of a harmony before,

so these moments of treble and bass

keep our remembering fresh.

Hearing the sound, we gather strength.

Love kindles with melody. Music feeds a lover

composure, and provides form for the imagination.

Music breathes on personal fire and makes it keener.

The waterhole is deep. A thirsty man climbs

a walnut tree growing next to the pool

and drops walnuts in one by one.

He listens carefully to the sound

as they hit and watches the bubbles.

A more rational man gives advice, You will regret

doing this. You are so far from the water

that by the time you get down to gather walnuts,

the water will have carried them away.

He replies, I am not here for walnuts.

I want the music they make when they hit.

OCTOBER 9

Your Eyes

I am so small I can barely be seen.

How can this great love be inside me?

Look at your eyes. They are so small,

but they see enormous things.

OCTOBER 10

In the Arc of Your Mallet

Don’t go anywhere without me.

Let nothing happen in the sky apart from me,

or on the ground, in this world or that world,

without my being in its happening.

Vision, see nothing I don’t see.

Language, say nothing.

The way the night knows itself with the moon,

be that with me. Be the rose

nearest to the thorn that I am.

I want to feel myself in you when you taste food,

in the arc of your mallet when you work,

when you visit friends, when you go

up on the roof by yourself at night.

There is nothing worse than to walk out along the street

without you. I don’t know where I’m going.

You are the road and the knower of roads,

more than maps, more than love.

OCTOBER 11

Love and I Talking

Love says, You cannot deny me. Try.

I say, Yes, you appear out of nowhere

like the bubbles in wine, here and then not.

Love says, Prisoned in the body-jar,

singing at the banquet. I say,

This ecstasy is dangerous.

Love says, I sip the delicious day,

until night takes the cup away.

Then I insist night give it back.

The light I see by never changes.

The water of realization is the wine we mean,

where love is the liquid and your body the flagon.

Grace floods in. The wine’s power

breaks the jar. It is happening now.

The water of waking becomes the one who pours,

the wine itself, and every presence at the banquet.

No metaphor can hold this truth that knows how

to keep secret and when to show itself.

OCTOBER 12

What’s Not Here

I start out on this road,

call it love or emptiness.

I only know what’s not here.

Resentment seeds, backscratching greed,

worrying about outcome, fear of people.

When a bird gets free,

it does not go back for remnants

left on the bottom of the cage.

Close by, I’m rain. Far off,

a cloud of fire. I seem restless,

but I am deeply at ease.

Branches tremble. The roots are still.

I am a universe in a handful of dirt,

whole when totally demolished.

Talk about choices does not apply to me.

While intelligence considers options,

I am somewhere lost in the wind.

OCTOBER 13

I’m Not Saying This Right

You bind me, and I tear away in a rage to open out

into air, a round brightness, a candlepoint,

all reason, all love.

This confusing joy, your doing,

this hangover, your tender thorn.

You turn to look, I turn.

I’m not saying this right.

I am a jailed crazy who ties up spirit-women.

I am Solomon.

What goes comes back. Come back.

We never left each other.

A disbeliever hides his disbelief,

but I will say his secret.

More and more awake, getting up at night,

spinning and falling with love for Shams.

OCTOBER 14

Autumn Rose Elegy

You have gone to the secret world.

Which way is it? You broke the cage and flew.

You heard the drum that calls you home.

You left this humiliating shelf, this disorienting

desert where we are given wrong directions.

What use now a crown?

You have become the sun.

No need for a belt.

You have slipped out of your waist.

I have heard that near the end

you were eyes looking at soul.

No looking now. You live inside the soul.

You are the strange autumn rose

that led the winter wind in by withering.

You are rain soaking everywhere

from cloud to ground.

No bother of talking. Flowing silence

and sweet sleep beside the Friend.

OCTOBER 15

Medicine out of Pain

In this drumbeat moment of red flowers opening

and grapes being crushed,

the soul and luminous clarity sit together.

All desire wants is a taste of you,

two small villages in a mountain valley

where everyone longs for presence.

We start to step up.

A step appears.

You say, I am more compassionate

than your mother and father.

I make medicine out of your pain.

From your chimney smoke I shape new constellations.

I tell everything, but I do not say it,

because, my friend, it is better

your secret be spoken by you.

OCTOBER 16

The Moments You Have Lived

As essence turns to ocean,

the particles glisten.

Watch how in this candleflame instant

blaze all the moments you have lived.

OCTOBER 17

The Knots Untie (1)

Fire is whispering a secret in smoke’s ear,

This aloeswood loves me

because I help it live out its purpose.

With me it becomes fragrance,

and then disappears altogether.

The knots untie and open into absence,

as you do with me, my friend.

Eaten by flame, and smoked out into the sky.

This is most fortunate.

What’s unlucky is not to change and disappear.

This way leads through humiliation and contempt.

OCTOBER 18

The Knots Untie (2)

We have tried the fullness of presence.

Now it’s time for desolation.

Love is pulling us out by the ears to school.

Love wants us clean of resentment

and those impulses that misguide our souls.

We are asleep, but Khidr

keeps sprinkling water on our faces.

Love will tell us the rest of what

we need to know soon.

Then we’ll be deeply asleep and profoundly awake

simultaneously, like cave companions.

OCTOBER 19

Looking for the Center

The Friend comes into my body

looking for the center, unable

to find it, draws a blade,

strikes anywhere.

OCTOBER 20

No Flag

I used to want buyers for my words.

Now I wish someone would buy me away from words.

I have made a lot of charmingly profound images,

scenes with Abraham and Abraham’s father, Azar,

who was famous for making icons.

I am so tired of what I have been doing.

Then one image without form came,

and I quit.

Look for someone else to tend the shop.

I am out of the image-making business.

Finally I know the freedom

of madness.

A random image arrives. I scream,

Get out! It disintegrates.

Only love.

Only the holder the flag fits into.

No flag.

OCTOBER 21

Consider What Choices

You wreck my shop and my house

and now my heart, but how can I run

from what gives me life?

I am weary of personal worrying,

in love with the art of madness.

Tear open my shame and show the mystery.

How much longer do I have to fret

with self-restraint and fear?

Friend, this is how it is.

We are fringe sewn inside

the lining of a robe.

Soon we will be loosened,

the binding threads torn out.

The beloved is a lion.

We are the lame deer in his paws.

Consider what choices we have.

OCTOBER 22

Underwater in the Fountain

When you die into the soul,

you lift the lid on the cooking pot.

You see the truth

of what you have been doing.

It looks terrible and sad

before the crossover move

that lets nine levels of ascension

turn into ordinary ground.

Into silence, a conversation with Khidr,

as there you are blind and deaf,

underwater in the fountain.

OCTOBER 23

Silkworms

The hurt you embrace

becomes joy.

Call it to your arms

where it can change.

A silkworm eating leaves

makes a cocoon.

Each of us weaves a chamber

of leaves and sticks.

Silkworms begin to truly exist

as they disappear inside that room.

Without legs, we fly.

When I stop speaking,

this poem will close, and

open its silent wings….

OCTOBER 24

Out in Empty Sky

If you catch a fragrance of the unseen,

like that, you will not be able

to be contained.

You will be out in empty sky.

Any beauty the world has, any desire,

will easily be yours.

As you live deeper in the heart,

the mirror gets clearer and cleaner.

Shams of Tabriz realized God in himself.

When that happens,

you have no anxieties about losing anyone

or anything. You break the spells

that human difficulties cause.

Interpretations come, hundreds,

from all the religious symbols

and parables and prayers.

You know what they mean,

when the presence lives through you.

OCTOBER 25

What I See in Your Eyes

Out of myself, but

wanting to go beyond that wanting what I see in your eyes,

not power, but to kiss the ground

with the dawn breeze for company,

wearing white pilgrim cloth.

I have a certain knowing.

Now I want sight.

OCTOBER 26

The King’s Lead-Camel

There is a boy watching a cornfield,

keeping birds away by beating a small drum.

A king with a huge army camps nearby.

He has a tall and powerful camel

that carries big kettle drums and a drummer

at the front of his columns

constantly throbbing out courage

and determination.

That particular camel wanders

into the boy’s cornfield.

The boy runs toward it

beating his toy tom-tom to scare it away.

A wise man advises, Don’t bother, my son.

That camel is used to drumsound.

He will not scare.

So a lover completely given to the beloved

has no fear of death and no need of showing off.

It is with me as with the boy,

who stops beating his fear-drum

to watch and follow quietly

behind the king’s lead camel

meandering through the corn.

OCTOBER 27

I Am Not

I am not the centuries-ago Muhammed.

I listen inside this day

like a fresh-fired Phoenix,

not some pigeon looking for seed.

There is a king for whom other kings

are stable boys. Some sip Hallaj’s wine.

I drink his truth by the jar, by the barrel.

Qibla for the soul, kaaba for the heart.

I am the constant sky,

not a Friday mosque’s ceiling dome.

Clean mirror, no rust.

I am the burning core of Mount Sinai,

not a mind full of hatred.

I taste a wine not pressed from grapes.

The one everyone calls to

when they are in sudden mortal danger,

I am That.

Gabriel could sit here beside me,

if he became God.

OCTOBER 28

The Lord of All the East

Slave, be aware that the Lord

of all the East is here.

A flickering stormcloud

shows his lightnings to you.

Your words are guesswork.

He speaks from experience.

There is a huge difference.

OCTOBER 29

Judge a Moth by the Beauty of Its Candle

You are the king’s son.

Why do you close yourself up?

Become a lover.

Don’t aspire to be a general

or a minister of state.

One is a boredom for you,

the other a disgrace.

You have been a picture on a bathhouse wall

long enough. No one recognizes you here, do they?

God’s lion disguised as a human being.

I saw that and put down the book

I was studying, Hariri’s Maqamat.

There is no early and late for us.

The only way to measure a lover

is by the grandeur of the beloved.

Judge a moth by the beauty of its candle.

Shams is invisible because he is inside sight.

He is the intelligent essence

of what is everywhere at once, seeing.

OCTOBER 30

He Is a Letter

Someone who goes with half a loaf of bread

to a small place that fits like a nest around him,

someone who wants no more,

who is not himself longed for

by anyone else.

He is a letter to everyone. You open it.

It says, Live.

OCTOBER 31

Undressing

Learn the alchemy true human beings know.

The moment you accept what troubles

you’ve been given, the door will open.

Welcome difficulty, as a familiar comrade.

Joke with torment brought by the Friend.

Sorrows are the rags of old clothes

and jackets that serve to cover,

and then are taken off.

That undressing,

and the naked body underneath,

is the sweetness that comes after grief.

NOVEMBER

NOVEMBER 1

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.

NOVEMBER 2

I Have Such a Teacher

Last night my teacher taught me the lesson of poverty,

having nothing and wanting nothing.

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.

Then wind, and the thunder of rain on the way.

I have such a teacher.

NOVEMBER 3

Ashes, Wanderers

In this battle we do not hold

a shield in front of us.

When we turn in sama,

we do not hear the flute or the tambourine.

Underneath these feet we become

nazar, the guide’s glance,

ashes, wanderers,

as the moon diminishes,

until it is gone for a few days,

to come back changed.

Send for the planet Venus to play here.

Flute, drum, and strings are not enough.

No. Who but these musicians

could stand the heat that melts the sun?

NOVEMBER 4

Move Within

Keep walking, though there’s no place to get to.

Don’t try to see through the distances.

That’s not for human beings. Move within,

but don’t move the way fear makes you move.

NOVEMBER 5

A Lantern

You so subtle you can can slip into my soul,

how would it be if you, for a time,

were living visibly here?

So hidden that you are hidden from hidden things,

you enter me, and my hiddenness

shines like a lantern.

You Solomon, who understands bird-language

and speaks it, what will you say now

through my mouth?

King whose bow no one can draw,

use me for an arrow.

Shams is the way I know God.

NOVEMBER 6

Unmarked Boxes

Don’t grieve. Anything you lose comes round

in another form. The child weaned from mother’s milk

now drinks wine and honey mixed.

God’s joy moves from unmarked box to unmarked box,

from cell to cell. As rainwater, down into flowerbed.

As roses, up from ground. Now it looks like

a plate of rice and fish, now a cliff

covered with vines, now a horse being saddled.

It hides within these, till one day it cracks them open.

Part of the self leaves the body when we sleep

and changes shape. You might say, Last night

I was a cypress tree, a small bed of tulips,

a field of grapevines. Then the phantasm goes away.

You are back in the room.

I don’t want to make anyone fearful.

Here what’s behind what I say.

Tatatumtum tatum tatadum. There is the light gold of wheat

in the sun and the gold of bread made from that wheat.

I have neither. I am only talking about them,

as a town in the desert looks up

at stars on a clear night.

NOVEMBER 7

Love Dogs

One night a man was crying Allah. Allah.

His lips grew sweet with the praising,

until a cynic said, So. I have heard you calling out,

but have you ever gotten any response?

The man had no answer for that.

He quit praying and fell into a confused sleep

where he dreamed he saw Khidr, the guide of souls,

in a thick green foliage.

Why did you stop praising? Because

I’ve never heard anything back.

This longing you express

is the return message.

The grief you cry out from

draws you toward union.

Your pure sadness that wants help

is the secret cup.

Listen to the moan of a dog for its master.

That whining is the connection.

There are love dogs no one knows the names of.

Give your life to be one of them.

NOVEMBER 8

A Door

I have lived on the lip

of insanity, wanting to know reasons,

knocking on a door. It opens.

I’ve been knocking from the inside.

NOVEMBER 9

Raw, Well-Cooked, and Burnt

You ask, Why do you cry

with such sweetness all around?

I weep as I make the honey,

wearing the shirt of a bee,

and I refuse to share this suffering.

I play the sky’s harp.

I curl around my treasure like a snake.

You say, What is this I business?

Friend, I’ve been a long time away from that.

What you see here is your own reflection.

I am still raw, and at the same time

well-cooked, and burnt to a crisp.

No one can tell if I’m laughing

or weeping. I wonder myself.

How can I be separated and yet in union?

NOVEMBER 10

This Piece of Food

This piece of food cannot be eaten,

nor this bit of wisdom found by looking.

There is a secret core in everyone

not even Gabriel can know by trying to know.

NOVEMBER 11

The Taste of Morning

Time’s knife slides from the sheath,

as a fish from where it swims.

Being closer and closer is the desire

of the body. Don’t wish for union.

There is a closeness beyond that.

Why would God want a second God?

Fall in love in such a way

that it frees you from any connecting.

Love is the soul’s light, the taste of morning,

no me, no we, no claim of being.

These words are the smoke the fire gives off

as it absolves its defects,

as eyes in silence, tears, face.

Love cannot be said.

NOVEMBER 12

Inside the Rose (1)

That camel there with its calf running behind it,

Sutur and Koshek, we are like them;

mothered and nursed

by where and whom we are from,

following our fates where they lead,

until we hear a drum begin,

grace entering our lives, a prayer of gratitude.

We feel the call of presence,

and the journey changes.

A dry field of stones turns soft and moist

as cheese. The mountain feels level under us.

Love becomes agile and quick,

and suddenly we are there.

This traveling is not done with the body.

God’s secret takes form in our loving.

NOVEMBER 13

Inside the Rose (2)

But there are those in bodies

who are pure soul. It can happen.

These messengers invite us to walk with them.

They say, You may feel happy enough where you are,

but we cannot do without you any longer. Please.

So we walk along inside the rose,

being pulled like the creeks and rivers are,

out from the town onto the plain.

My guide, my soul, your only sadness

is when I am not walking with you.

In deep silence, and with some exertion

to stay in your company,

I could save you a lot of trouble.

NOVEMBER 14

Held Like This

Held like this, to draw in milk,

no will, tasting clouds of milk,

never so content.

NOVEMBER 15

An Edge of Foam

A dervish lover was told to turn

toward his own face,

and he did, saying, Lord, lord, for years

with no answer, no message back,

yet he was always there turning in silence,

with no music supporting him,

no tambourine rhythm.

A pigeon knows which roof to haunt.

Even if you drive it off,

it will circle and stay near.

This is the critical moment

when a swell of ocean turns

its edge to foam.

Every dervish has two mouths,

a crafted reed opening

and the lips of the fluteplayer.

Lord, don’t speak from there.

NOVEMBER 16

Whatever Circles

Walk to the well.

Turn as the earth and the moon turn,

circling what they love.

Whatever circles comes from the center.

NOVEMBER 17

How Minds Most Want to Be

You are the living marrow. The rest is hay.

Dead grass does not nourish a human being.

When you are not here, this desire we feel

has no traveling companion.

When the sun is gone, the soul’s clarity fades.

There is nothing but idiocy and mistakes.

We are half-dead, inanimate, exhausted.

The way minds most want to be

is an ocean with a soul swimming in it.

No one can describe that.

My soul, you are a master, a Moses, a Jesus.

Why do I stay blind in your presence?

You are Joseph at the bottom of his well.

Constantly working, but you do not get paid,

because what you do seems trivial, like play.

Now silence. Unless these words fill

with nourishment from the unseen, they will stay empty.

Why would I serve my friends bowls

with no food in them?

NOVEMBER 18

An Elephant in the Dark

Some Hindus have an elephant to show.

No one here has ever seen an elephant.

They bring it at night to a dark room.

One by one, we go in the dark and come out

saying how we experience the animal.

One of us happens to touch the trunk.

A water-pipe kind of creature.

Another, the ear. A very strong, always moving

back and forth, fan-animal. Another, the leg.

I find it still, like a column on a temple.

Another touches the curved back.

A leathery throne. Another, the cleverest,

feels the tusk. A rounded sword made of porcelain.

He is proud of his description.

Each of us touches one place

and understands the whole in that way.

The palm and the fingers feeling in the dark

are how the senses explore the reality of the elephant.

If each of us held a candle there,

and if we went in together, we could see it.

NOVEMBER 19

I See My Beauty in You

I see my beauty in you,

I become a mirror

that cannot close its eyes to your longing.

My eyes wet with yours in the early light.

My mind every moment giving birth,

always conceiving, always in the ninth month,

always the come-point.

How do I stand this?

We become these words we say,

a wailing sound moving out into the air.

These thousands of worlds that rise from nowhere,

how does your face contain them?

I am a fly in your honey, then closer,

a moth caught in the flame’s allure,

then empty sky stretched out in homage.

NOVEMBER 20

Grainy Taste

Without a net, I catch a falcon

and release it to the sky,

hunting God.

This wine I drink today

was never held in a clay jar.

I love this world,

even as I hear the great wind

of leaving it rising,

for there is a grainy taste I prefer

to every idea of heaven:

human friendship.

NOVEMBER 21

This Recklessness

I have no vocation but this,

and no need to touch every rose and thornpoint.

You are seeing though my eyes

and tasting with my tongue.

Why sell bitterness? Why do anything?

When you breakfast at the king’s table,

there is no appetite for lunch.

I do not complain or brag about ascetic practices.

I would explain, but words will not help,

how there is nothing to grieve.

If you have no trace of this recklessness,

tell me your state.

I have forgotten how to say how I am.

The sun has already shone today.

Why should I describe the moon

coming up over our sleeping quarters?

NOVEMBER 22

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 are 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.

NOVEMBER 23

The Music

For sixty years I have been forgetful,

every minute, but not for a second

has this flowing toward me stopped or slowed.

I deserve nothing. Today I recognize

that I am the guest the mystics talk about.

I play this living music for my host.

Everything today is for the host.

NOVEMBER 24

Bonfire at Midnight

A shout comes out of my room

where I’ve been cooped up.

After all my lust and dead living

I can still live with you.

You want me to.

You fix and bring me food.

You forget the way I’ve been.

The ocean moves and surges in the heat

of the middle of the day,

in the heat of this thought I’m having.

Why aren’t all human resistances

burning up with this thought?

It is a drum and arms waving.

It is a bonfire at midnight on the top edge of a hill,

this meeting again with you.

NOVEMBER 25

When You Feel Your Lips

When you feel your lips becoming infinite

and sweet, like the moon in a sky,

when you feel that spaciousness inside,

Shams of Tabriz will be there too.

NOVEMBER 26

Empty

When you are with everyone but me,

you are with no one.

When you are with no one but me,

you are with everyone.

Instead of being so bound up with everyone,

be everyone.

When you become that many,

you are nothing. Empty.

NOVEMBER 27

Only Breath (1)

Ah, true believers, what can I say?

I no longer know who I am.

   Not Christian or Jew or Muslim.

   Not Hindu, Buddhist, Sufi, or Zen.

   I am not from the East or the West,

   not out of ocean or up from ground.

   Not natural or ethereal, not composed

   of elements at all. I do not exist.

   I am not from China or India, not

   from the town of Bulghar on the Volga

   nor remote Arabian Saqsin. Not

   from either Iraq, between the rivers,

   or in western Persia. Not an entity

   in this world or the next. I did not

   descend from Adam and Eve or any origin

   story. My place is the placeless,

   a trace of the traceless, neither

   body or soul, I belong to the beloved,

   have seen the two worlds as one

   and that one call to and know,

   first, last, outer, inner, only

   that breath breathing human being.

NOVEMBER 28

Only Breath (2)

Friends, when I taste love’s wine,

the two worlds combine,

and I have no purpose

but this play of presences.

If I spend one moment outside you,

I repent, and when I have

a moment of closer rapport,

I dance to rubble the ruins

of both. Shams Tabriz,

this friendship is all I say.

NOVEMBER 29

Mary’s Hiding

Before these possessions you love

slip away, say what Mary said

when she was surprised by Gabriel.

   I’ll hide inside God.

Naked in her room

she saw a form of beauty

that could give her new life.

Like the sun coming up,

or a rose as it opens,

she leaped, as her habit was,

out of herself into the presence.

There was fire in the channel of her breath.

Light and majesty came.

I am smoke from that fire

and proof of its existence,

more than any external form.

NOVEMBER 30

Smoke

Don’t listen to anything I say.

I must enter the center of the fire.

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 talking to each other.

You are too dense. Go away.

You are too wavering.

I have solid form.

In the darkness those friends keep arguing.

Like a wanderer with no face.

Like the most powerful bird in existence

sitting on its perch, refusing to move.

DECEMBER

DECEMBER 1

Awkward Comparisons

This physical world has no two things alike.

Every comparison is awkwardly rough.

You can put a lion next to a man,

but the placing is hazardous to both.

Say the body is like this lamp.

It has to have a wick and oil, sleep and food.

If it doesn’t get those, it will die,

and it is always burning those up, trying to die.

But where is the sun in this comparison?

It rises, and the lamp’s light

mixes with the day.

Oneness, which is the true reality,

cannot be understood with lamp and sun images,

and the blurring of a plural into a unity is wrong.

No image can describe

what of our fathers and mothers,

our grandfathers and grandmothers, remains.

Language does not touch

the one who lives in both of us.

DECEMBER 2

The Sweet Taste of Grief

I saw grief drinking a cup of sorrow

and called out,

    It tastes sweet, does it not?

You have caught me, grief answered,

and you have ruined my business.

How can I sell sorrow,

    when you know it’s a blessing?

DECEMBER 3

A General Introductory Lecture

A nightingale flies nearer the roses.

A girl blushes. Pomegranates ripen.

Hallaj will be executed.

A man walks a mountain path, solitary

and full of prayer.

Narcissus at the edge, creekwater washing

tree roots. God is giving

a general introductory lecture.

We hear and read it everywhere,

in the field, through the branches.

We will never finish studying.

Neither of us has a penny,

yet we are walking the jeweler’s bazaar

seriously considering making a purchase.

Or shall I say this with other metaphors?

A barn crowded with souls.

Quietness served around a table.

Two people talk along a road

that’s paved with words.

DECEMBER 4

Jars of Springwater

Jars of springwater are not enough anymore.

Take us down to the river.

The face of peace, the sun itself.

No more the slippery, cloudlike moon.

Give us one clear morning after another,

and the one whose work remains unfinished,

who is our work as we diminish,

idle, though occupied, empty, and open.

DECEMBER 5

Your Face

You may be planning departure,

as a human soul leaves the world

taking almost all its sweetness with it.

You saddle your horse. You must be going.

Remember that you have friends here

as faithful as the grass and the sky.

Have I failed you? Possibly you are angry.

But remember our nights of conversation,

the well work, yellow roses by the ocean,

the longing, the archangel Gabriel saying,

So be it.

Shams Tabriz, your face

is what every religion tries to remember.

DECEMBER 6

Listening (1)

What is the deep listening?

Sama is a greeting from the secret ones

inside the heart, a letter.

The branches of your intelligence

grow new leaves in the wind of this listening.

The body reaches a peace.

Rooster sound comes,

reminding you of your love for dawn.

The reed flute and the singer’s lips.

The knack of how spirit breathes into us

becomes as simple and ordinary

as eating and drinking.

The dead rise with the pleasure of listening.

If someone cannot hear a trumpet melody,

sprinkle dirt on him and declare him dead.

DECEMBER 7

Listening (2)

Listen, and feel the beauty of your separation,

the unsayable absence.

There is a moon inside every human being.

Learn to be companions with it.

Give more of your life to this listening.

As brightness is to time,

so you are to the one who talks

to the deep ear in your chest.

I should sell my tongue and buy a thousand ears

when that one steps near and begins to speak.

DECEMBER 8

A Voice through the Door

Sometimes you hear a voice through the door

calling you, as fish out of water

hear the waves, or a hunting falcon

hears the drum’s Come back. Come back.

This turning toward what you deeply love

saves you. Read the book of your life,

which has been given you.

A voice comes to your soul saying,

Lift your foot. Cross over.

Move into the emptiness

of question and answer and question.

DECEMBER 9

Descend into the Pith

Would you like to have revealed to you

the truth of the Friend?

Leave the rind,

and descend into the pith.

Fold within fold, the beloved

drowns in his own being. This world

is drenched with that drowning.

DECEMBER 10

Majesty and Helplessness

Always check your inner state

with the lord of your heart.

Copper does not know it’s copper,

until it is changing into gold.

Your loving does not know its majesty,

until it knows its helplessness.

DECEMBER 11

One Swaying Being

Love is not condescension, never that,

nor books, nor any marking on paper,

nor what people say of each other.

Love is a tree

with branches reaching into eternity

and roots set deep in eternity,

and no trunk.

Have you seen it? The mind cannot.

Your desiring cannot.

The longing you feel for this love

comes from inside you.

When you become the Friend,

your longing will be as the man in the ocean

who holds to a piece of wood.

Eventually, wood, man, and ocean

become one swaying being,

Shams Tabriz, the secret of God.

DECEMBER 12

A Dying Dog

A dog is dying on the road.

A man is weeping beside him. A beggar comes by.

Why the tears? This dog hunted game for me.

He kept watch at night.

Many times he drove away thieves.

What’s wrong? Hunger has weakened him.

What’s in the bag? Your food sack looks full.

Those are leftovers from last night.

I’ll eat them later.

Give a little to the dog.

I give him these tears instead.

They are easier to come by.

Food on the road costs hard-earned money.

The beggar curses the man and leaves.

The beggar is right. The man’s values are reversed.

Tears are worth more than money.

Tears are blood distilled into water.

Pay attention to those who want to change

so badly that they cry and dissolve

into lovingkindness and freedom.

DECEMBER 13

The Nightwatchman (1)

I sit by the side of one who watches

like the stars at night without sleeping watch.

My friend sits on the roof at night.

I attend that watching.

During the day I help with the gardening.

He is both a tender of flowers

and flowering trees.

It is no shame to be in this friendship,

or if it is, it is.

I was on my way elsewhere

when I saw the nightwatchman

sitting on the sky’s roof like a guard.

Like a king, like a gardener in his garden,

rainwet stones, like the body’s hand-me-down.

DECEMBER 14

The Nightwatchman (2)

The nightwatchman knows the way

from body to soul, how soul moves

in stomach bile, in blood and semen, in saliva.

Soul works inside those fluids

to keep the body fresh and full of energy.

So the stars and the planets and this world

are moving to bring grace here

through the cold night-clarity.

Events like battle arrows crisscross

from every direction. There is only one archer.

The skill of the sheepdog comes from the shepherd.

A city has a collective intelligence,

and each person there has a unique knowing.

Sometimes random bits pretend

to be a caravan, but it was a good messenger

who brought us the order out on the road

to Come back. Come back.

DECEMBER 15

Wean Yourself

Little by little, wean yourself.

This is the gist of what I have to say.

From an embryo, whose nourishment comes in blood,

move to an infant drinking milk,

to a child on solid food,

to a searcher after wisdom,

to a hunter of more invisible game.

Think how it is to have a conversation with an embryo.

You might say, The world outside is vast and intricate.

There are wheatfields and mountain passes

and orchards in bloom.

At night there are millions of galaxies, and in sunlight

the beauty of friends dancing at a wedding.

You ask the embryo why he or she stays cooped up

in the dark with its eyes closed.

Listen to the answer.

There is no “other world.”

I only know what I have experienced.

You must be hallucinating.

DECEMBER 16

A Mouse and a Frog (1)

A mouse and a frog meet every morning on the riverbank.

They sit in a nook of the ground and talk.

Each morning, the second they see each other,

they open easily, telling stories and dreams and secrets,

empty of any fear or suspicious holding-back.

To watch and listen to those two

is to understand how, as it is written,

sometimes when two beings come together,

Christ becomes visible.

The mouse starts laughing out a story he hasn’t thought of

in five years, and the telling might take five years.

There is no blocking the speechflow-river-running

all-carrying momentum that true intimacy is.

Bitterness doesn’t have a chance with those two.

The God-messenger Khidr touches a roasted fish.

It leaps off the grill back into the water.

Friend sits by Friend, and the tablets appear.

They read the mysteries off each other’s foreheads.

DECEMBER 17

A Mouse and a Frog (2)

But one day the mouse complains, There are times

when I want sohbet, and you’re out in the water,

jumping around where you can’t hear me.

We meet at this appointed time,

but the text says, Lovers pray constantly.

Once a day, once a week, five times an hour,

is not enough. Fish like we are

need the ocean around us.

Do camel bells say, Let’s meet back here Thursday night?

Ridiculous. They jingle

together continuously,

talking while the camel walks.

Do you pay regular visits to yourself?

Don’t argue or answer rationally.

Let us die,

     and dying, reply.

* This is the night Rumi died, in 1273 .

DECEMBER 18

What Is Love? Gratitude

Don’t unstring your bow.

I am your four-feathered arrow

that has not been used yet.

I am a strong knifeblade word,

not some if or maybe, dissolving in air.

I am sunlight slicing the dark.

Who made this night?

A forge deep in the earth-mud.

What is the body?

Endurance.

What is love?

Gratitude.

What is hidden in our chests?

Laughter.

What else?

Compassion.

Don’t ask what love can make or do.

Look at the colors of the world.

The riverwater moving in all rivers at once.

DECEMBER 19

Tattooing in Qazwin (1)

In Qazwin they have a custom of tattooing themselves

for good luck, with a blue ink,

on the back of the hand, the shoulder, wherever.

A certain man there goes to his barber

and asks to be given a powerful, heroic blue lion

on his shoulder blade.

And do it with flair. I have Leo Ascending.

I want plenty of blue.

But as soon as the needle starts pricking,

he howls, What are you doing?

The lion.

Which part did you start with?

I began with the tail.

Leave out the tail. That lion’s rump

is in a bad place for me. It cuts off my wind.

The barber continues and immediately

the man yells out, Oooooooooooooo, which part now?

DECEMBER 20

Tattooing in Qazwin (2)

The ear.

Doc, let’s do a lion with no ears this time.

The barber shakes his head and once more

the needle and once more, the wailing.

Where are you now?

The belly.

I like a lion without a belly.

The master lion-maker stands for a long time

with his fingers in his mouth.

Finally, he throws the needle down.

No one has ever asked me to do such a thing.

To create a lion without a tail or a head or a stomach.

God himself could not do it.

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. That way a thorn expands to a rose.

A particular glows with the universal.

What is it to praise? Make yourself particles.

What is it to know something of God?

Burn inside that presence. Burn up.

DECEMBER 21

A Star with No Name

When a baby is taken from the wet nurse,

it easily forgets her and starts eating solid food.

Seeds feed awhile on the ground,

then lift up into the sun.

So you should taste filtered light

and work toward that which has no personal covering.

That’s how you came here, like a star with no name.

Move in the night sky with those anonymous lights.

DECEMBER 22

What Jesus Runs From

The son of Mary, Jesus, hurries up a slope

as though a wild animal were chasing him.

Someone following him asks, Where are you going?

No one is after you. Are you the one

who says words over a dead person, so that

he wakes up? I am. Who then could possibly

cause you to run like this? Jesus explains.

I say the Great Name over the deaf and the blind,

they are healed. Over a stony mountainside

and it tears its mantle down to the navel.

But when I speak lovingly for hours with those

who take human warmth and mock it, when I say the Name

to them, nothing happens. They remain rock,

or turn to sand. Other diseases are ways for mercy

to enter, but this nonresponding breeds violence

and coldness toward God. I am fleeing from that. As

little by little air steals water, so praise

dries up and evaporates with foolish people who refuse to

change. Like cold stone you sit on, a cynic steals

body heat. He does not feel the sun. Jesus was not running

from anything. He was teaching in a new way.

DECEMBER 23

Cry Easily

Keep your intelligence white-hot

and your grief glistening,

so your life will stay fresh.

Cry easily like a little child.

DECEMBER 24

Soul, Heart, and Body One Morning

There is a morning where presence

comes over you, and you sing

like a rooster in your earth-colored shape.

Your heart hears and, no longer frantic,

begins to dance. At that moment

soul reaches total emptiness.

Your heart becomes Mary, miraculously pregnant,

and body, like a two-day-old Jesus,

says wisdom words.

Now the heart turns to light,

and the body picks up the tempo.

Where Shams Tabriz walks, the footprints

are musical notes, and holes

you fall through into space.

DECEMBER 25

The Population of the World

Christ is the population of the world,

and every object as well. There is no room

for hypocrisy. Why use bitter soup for healing,

when sweet water is everywhere?

DECEMBER 26

Your True Life

As you start to walk out on the way,

the way appears.

As you cease to be,

true life begins.

As you grow smaller,

this world cannot contain you.

You will be shown a being

that has no you in it.

DECEMBER 27

A Subtle Truth

If you want money more than anything,

you will be bought and sold.

If you have a greed for food,

you will become a loaf of bread.

This is a subtle truth.

Whatever you love, you are.

DECEMBER 28

One Transparent Sky

Lovers think they are looking for each other,

but there is only one search.

Wandering this world is wandering that,

both inside one transparent sky.

In here there is no dogma and no heresy.

The miracle of Jesus is himself,

not what he said or did about the future.

Forget the future. I would worship someone

who could do that.

On the way you may want to look back, or not,

but if you can say, There is nothing ahead,

there will be nothing there.

Stretch your arms and take hold

the cloth of your clothes with both hands.

The cure for pain is in the pain.

Good and bad are mixed. If you don’t have both,

you do not belong with us.

When someone gets lost, is not here,

he must be inside us. There is no place like that

anywhere in the world.

DECEMBER 29

God in the Stew

Is there a human mouth

that does not give out soul-sound?

Is there love, a drawing-together

of any kind, that is not sacred?

Every natural dog

sniffs God in the stew.

Look inside your mind.

Do you hear the crowd gathering?

Help coming, every second.

Still you cover your eyes with mud.

Wash your face.

Anyone who steps into an orchard,

walks inside the orchard keeper.

Millions of love-tents bloom on the plain.

A star in your chest says,

None of this is outside you.

Close your lips and let the maker of mouths

talk, the one who says, things.

DECEMBER 30

Say Who I Am (1)

I am dust particles in sunlight.

I am the round sun.

To the bits of dust I say, Stay.

To the sun, Keep moving.

I am morning mist,

and the breathing of evening.

I am wind in the top of a grove,

and surf on the cliff.

Mast, rudder, helmsman, and keel,

I am also the coral reef they founder on.

I am a tree with a trained parrot in its branches.

Silence, thought, and voice.

DECEMBER 31

Say Who I Am (2)

The musical air coming through a flute,

a spark off a stone, a flickering in metal.

Both candle,

and the moth crazy around it.

Rose, and the nightingale

lost in the fragrance.

I am all orders of being, the circling galaxy,

the evolutionary intelligence,

the lift and the falling away.

What is and what isn’t.

You who know Jelaluddin,

you the one in all,

say who I am.

Say I am you.

AFTERWORD

“AMERGIN’S SONG” AND WHAT MOVES THROUGH TIME

Robert Graves says in The White Goddess that the study of Western culture should begin not with The Odyssey or with Genesis, but with the ancient Celtic poem “Amergin’s Song,” a poem that was passed down in the oral tradition for almost three millenia until it began to be written down in various forms about 1100 A.D. It consists of a list of images that the poem’s voice claims to inhabit. Amergin was the chief bard of the Milesians, a Celtic tribe of northern Spain. The legend is that he spoke this as his people were coming ashore on the southern coast of Ireland, around 1500 B.C. Amergin presents twenty-one images that announce the soul’s shape-shifting presence. It is thought the poem may have a calendar embedded in it, and also an alphabet and a pantheon. Amergin means “born of song.” I have freely reworked the poem from Robert Graves and his ideas, from Jean Markale, and several other sources. Maybe it truly was Beltane, May Day, 1530 B.C., that Amergin, with his right foot on land and his left in the surf, sang this into the Irish air.

Amergin’s Song

I am the stag with seven tines,

a flood widening across a plain.

I am wind in a trough of ocean,

the sun’s tear, a globe of dew-wet

on an alder branch. I am a hawk

above the cliff, streaming and still,

a thorn beneath the thumbnail,

fire that makes a human head

of smoke above itself.

I am the oak and the lightning

that blackens one side, salmon swimming

and the taste of it cooked

on a hawthorne shaft, a hill of vineyards

and hazelnut trees where poets walk.

I am the charging wild boar, the ivy,

a breaker thrumming down its falling edge.

I am the infant under the unhewn dolmen stone,

flower in the midst of other flowers,

spearpoint. I am the bonfire on the hill,

the hive-queen and the shield,

the screech owl. I am the burning raft

with its body set adrift on nightwater.

The calendar within these images might be read like this: the royal stag with seven tines on each horn, fourteen total, stands as an emblem for late December, from the 26th through some days, on into January. The flood opening across a plain covers to mid-February; wind over deep water to mid-March.

The shining tear on an alder branch reflects the fragile first half of April. Hawk balancing over cliff edge, mid-May. A single flower among other flowers is for the moment ending June 9. June 10 to July 17 holds the midsummer inspiration in a boiling head of smoke over a bonfire.

The taste of salmon with poets walking a hillside of vineyards and hazelnut trees remains to the end of September. Then the fierce intent of the wild boar, ivy, and a ravening spearthrust runs through October. The threatening sound of winter ocean, the hive-queen of November, and a screech owl carry through December 20.

December 21, 22, and 23 enclose the silence of a hero buried in foetal position waiting for the new, the naked infant to be lain December 24 and 25 under the ceremonial standing stones like an opened cloth. Then, past midnight, the sea burial raft burns passage, and the stag is seen again on the steep mountainside. “Amergin’s Song” presents these twenty-one glyphs for the psyche’s motion through time. In a medieval copy of the poem, marginal glosses might name a human quality held in each image thus:

The sun enclosed in a drop of dew—for clarity and grief.

Hawk balanced in air—for deftness and skill.

Salmon—for knowledge.

Wild boar—for the sudden veering of decision.

A river flooding—for expansiveness.

The smoke-formed head—for inspiration.

The sound of winter surf, the hive, and the screech owl—for death-fear and night-terror.

Flower among other flowers—for courtesy.

The alpha stag—for majesty and vigorous strength.

Wind over ocean—for depth.

Thorn beneath thumbnail—for betrayal.

The poets’ hill—for the shared joy of making.

Infant under a dolmen stone—for revelation, grace, and what we will never know, the ignorance and the innocence.

The burning funeral raft—a closing door, for the approach of time’s limit.

Rumi has similar sequence poems about the everyday and extraordinary glory of the soul, our momentary, seasonal identities that are flickering and yet whole, wave and particle at once: “Say Who I Am,” December 30–31; “Only Breath,” November 28–29; “I Am Not,” October 27; and “No Room for Form,” October 1–2.

The Celts and the Sufis sing the same song about our inner individuality, or almost the same. They praise the majesty of it, the variety, the breadth, and the elusiveness.

Some may hear these poems as massively inflated, ego-giganticus bellowing. Whitman has been so misread. But Rumi’s experience is not inflation. Nor is Amergin’s or Whitman’s. What they hear and respond to is the double-music of being with nonbeing, crazy moth and candle, dazed bird inside invisible rose fragrance, Taoist and Tao merging. In their delerious lists these poems merge soul, spirit, body-intelligence, mind, beloved, and way into one voice. This play of presences is Rumi’s province and provender, the dance floor, the dancers dancing, and the band. I would claim that such presences are at play in any attempt at creative making. It is what we do and are, artists or not. But enough grand theory. There truly is nothing like our lives, us in them, the open sky, and the world around. Nothing like. And these Celtic and Sufi poems that are mostly composed of a sequence of sentences beginning “I am…,” “I have been…,” or “I am not….” are the expressions of what is so alive that it cannot be held for long with any sleight of language. Such poems delight in how identity is absorbed in the seasonal flow of being. They sense the sacredness of that ordinary immanence. I hear these poems as coming from the edge of an unknown. The trance poem that Amergin speaks is meant to free his tribe into the wild, into a multiple oneness. It comes from the essence of what it means to be a Celt, as Rumi’s I am, I am not poems come from the core of what a Sufi is, a beyond-definition seeking. Both move out from the human heart as it searches for spirit, at risk and in danger, claiming an oceanic expansiveness. These extravagant poems sound familiar to us because we have heard many of our poets saying something similar—and particularly Whitman’s Song of Myself, the entire fifty-two sections of which are an invitation to join him in his vast listening and his compassionate-identity witness.

I have enjoyed setting Rumi’s imagery and visions to align with one whirling circle of the earth round the sun. Three hundred and sixty-six poetry glyphs put alongside the Gregorian numbering of our days. Sing, chronicity. Sing.

REFERENCES

Each day entry reference has two parts:

1) Its location in Rumi’s work. A pound sign followed by a numeral indicates the number of the rubai (short poem) or ghazal (longer poem) in Professor Furuzanfar’s standard numbering in his edition, Kulliyat-e Shams, (8 volumes, Tehran: Amir Kabir Press, 1957–1966). These translations have been done in collaboration either with the Persian scholar John Moyne or with the work of the Cambridge Islamicist, A.J. Arberry. See the footnote on the first page of the Introduction for information on those books. A Roman numeral, I–VI, followed by numbers indicates the book and lines in the Masnavi of Reynold Nicholson’s translation, The Mathnawi of Jalaluddin Rumi (London: Luzac, 1925–1940.) Nicholson was Arberry’s teacher at Cambridge and a pioneer of Rumi translation in English. The line numbers are approximate. ND refers to Nicholson’s Selected Poems from the Divani Shams-e Tabrizi (Bethesda, MD: Ibex reprint, 2001). RO refers to Rudolf Otto, Mysticism East and West (New York: Meridian Books, 1957). PP refers to A.J. Arberry’s Persian Poems (Everyman Library, 1954). “Arb.” (Arberry) and a number and a letter indicate the page and the location on the page of a quatrain in A.J. Arberry’s translation, The Rubaiyat of Jalal al-din Rumi (London: Emery Walker, 1949). No Furuzanfar numbers are available in that volume. Many of the no ref.’s indicate that the quatrain has been reworked from that collection. The notations beginning with “Ergin” refer to one of the twenty-two volumes of Nevit Ergin’s translation (from Golpinarli’s Turkish) of The Shams (the Divani Shamsi Tabriz) and to the ghazal numbers within that. The more puzzling Ergin references (Mag for his Magnificent One and GO for Golpinarli’s Gul Deste) may be deciphered by referring to the more detailed References section at the back of The Glance (see below). A project is underway to discover and list the corresponding standard Furuzanfar numbers for Dr. Ergin’s work, but that task is not yet complete. See the Web site at www.dar-al-masnavi.org/erg-foruz-concord.htlm. In several cases I was unable to find the reference. Bad bookkeeping. Whatever you call the collaborative effort at translation that I do, it is not scholarship. I aspire more to the soulbook practice described in the Introduction.

2) The second element in each reference entry locates it in one of the volumes of my translations. For A Year With Rumi some poems have been edited, relineated, re-titled, or excerpted. Readers can find the longer versions, the context, in the following books. These are their abbreviations in the reference listings: ER: The Essential Rumi, New Expanded Edition (HarperSanFrancisco, 2004). BoL: Rumi, The Book of Love (HarperSanFrancisco, 2003). SoR: The Soul of Rumi (HarperSanFranciso, 2001). SIAY: Say I Am You (Maypop, 1994). LT: Like This (Maypop, 1990). TL: This Longing (Threshold/Shambhala, 1988). UR: Unseen Rain (Threshold/Shambhala, 1986). WAT: We Are Three (Maypop, 1987). DL: Delicious Laughter (Maypop, 1990). OHBW: One-Handed Basket Weaving (Maypop, 1991). G: The Glance (Viking, 1999). B: Birdsong (Maypop, 1993). IR: The Illuminated Rumi (Broadway, 1997). Poems that appear here for the first time are indicated by AYWR.

January

1–V, 672ff; ER; 2–I, 1489ff; ER; 3–Arb. 145b; ER; 4–#2336; ER; 5–III, 3762ff; ER; 6–Arb. 178a; ER; 7–#825; ER; 8–#2429; ER; 9–III, 4624ff; ER; 10–#831; ER; 11–II, 2212ff; ER; 12–#1299; ER; 13–I, 2870ff; ER; 14–#181; AYWR; 15–IV, 1990ff; SIAY; 16–#82; ER; 17–Arb. 153b; ER; 18–IV, 349ff; SoR; 19–#1288; ER; 20–V, 2020ff; ER; 21–#170; ER; 22–#388; ER; 23–#2303; ER; 24–III, 1972ff; ER; 25–III, 1972ff; ER; 26–III, 1972ff; ER; 27–III, 1972ff; ER; 28–IV, 2683ff; ER; 29–IV, 490ff; SoR; 30–V, 2143ff; ER; 31–IV, 1960ff; ER

February

1—#1359; ER; 2–no ref.; AYWR; 3–#1047; ER; 4–#617; ER; 5–Arberry 66a; ER; 6–#598; ER; 7–#828; ER; 8–II, 2214ff; ER; 9–Discourse #4; SIAY; 10–#185; SIAY; 11–IV, 3226ff; SIAY; 12–IV, 3628ff; ER; 13–no ref.; BoL; 14–no ref.; ER; 15–#667; ER; 16–IV, 2611ff; ER; 17–IV, 2537ff; ER; 18–#436; SIAY; 19–#436; SIAY; 20–no ref.; ER; 21–#882; ER; 22–I, 3325ff; ER; 23–#36; ER; 24–#1924; ER; 25–#2779; ER; 26–no ref.; IR; 27–IV, 3678ff; ER; 28–IV, 3708ff; ER; 29–VI, 1466ff; OHBW

March

1–III, 4694ff; ER; 2–#1888; ER; 3–#1051; ER; 4–#951; ER; 5–#747; ER; 6–VI, 216ff; ER; 7–#612; ER; 8–III, 1114ff; ER; 9–II, preface; ER; 10–#940; ER; 11–#1025; ER; 12–II, 156ff; ER; 13–#7; ER; 14–#1270; ER; 15–Letters #20; TL; 16–#397; ER; 17–VI, 642ff; ER; 18–#628; ER; 19–#3019; ER; 20–#393; ER; 21–#2003; ER; 22–#636; ER; 23–#823; ER; 24–#211; ER; 25–#2805; ER; 26–#914; ER; 27–#2196; ER; 28–#707; SIAY; 29–V, 183ff; ER; 30–V, 183ff; ER; 31–#569; ER

April

1–#2693; ER; 2–#25; ER; 3–V, 2221ff; ER; 4–#12; ER; 5–V, 3831ff; ER; 6–no ref.; B; 7–#2728; ER; 8–II, 2338ff; ER; 9–#2776; ER; 10–no ref.; SIAY; 11–#532; LT; 12–#1754; ER; 13–IV, 3628ff; OHBW; 14–Ergin 7a,#76; G; 15–no ref.; IR; 16–#1635; ER; 17–no ref.; ER; 18–V, 2855; SIAY; 19–IV, 863; SIAY; 20–IV, 863; SIAY; 21–no ref; SIAY; 22–#2; ER; 23–IV, 2921ff; SoR; 24–no ref.; SoR; 25–V, 1105ff; OHBW; 26–VI, 2686ff; TL; 27–IV, 2034ff; SoR; 28–V, 420ff; ER; 29–V, 420ff; ER; 30–I, 30ff; ER

May

1–VI, 3914ff; OHBW; 2–Ergin, no ref.; BoL; 3–no ref.; 4–Ergin 8b, #162; SoR; 5–II, 1932; ER; 6–I, 2163ff; ER; 7–Ergin 3, #159; G; 8–#258; ER; 9–VI, 3986ff; ER; 10–no ref.; 11–#7; ER; 12–#730; ER; 13–II, 1720ff; ER; 14–#1195; LT; 15–VI, 2195; ER; 16–#3050; LT; 17–IV, 2540ff; ER; 18–IV, 2540ff; ER; 19–#1246; ER; 20–Arb.169b; B; 21–Arb.12b; B; 22–III, 3204ff; DL; 23–#723; ER; 24–PP; ER; 25–Ergin 7b, #223; G; 26–II, 2580ff; ER; 27–III, 3545ff; ER; 28–#1447; ER; 29–#1678; ER; 30–#1972; ER; 31–no ref.; AYWR

June

1–Ergin 3, #117; SoR; 2–III, 4258ff; SoR; 3–#171; BoL; 4–no ref.; BoL; 5–#2028; ER; 6–#2103; ER; 7–#2120; ER; 8–IV, 3259ff; ER; 9–no ref.; DL; 10–no ref.; AYWR; 11–#751; ER; 12–no ref.; SoR; 13–no ref.; SoR; 14–no ref.; SoR; 15–no ref.; SoR; 16–Ergin 8a, #83; SoR; 17–III, 1222ff; ER; 18–no ref.; B; 19–no ref.; B; 20–II, 1386ff; OHBW; 21–no ref.; B; 22–no ref.; B; 23–#1879; WAT; 24–VI, 3220ff; WAT; 25–II, 1680ff; WAT; 26–Ergin 7b, #256; G; 27–Ergin 2, #93; G; 28–Ergin 7b, #271; G; 29–Ergin 4, #66; G; 30–I, 34ff; ER

July

1–#887; ER; 2–VI, 2347ff; OHBW; 3–I, 1878ff; OHBW; 4–II, 3641ff, III, 2122ff; OHBW; 5–#2155; LT; 6–I, 1480; OHBW; 7–III, 4664ff; OHBW; 8–III, 2656ff; OHBW; 9–III, 2656ff; OHBW; 10–IV, 3262ff; OHBW; 11–III, 2149ff; OHBW; 12–#892; AYWR; 13–Ergin 1, #143; 14–Ergin 2, #120; G; 15–Ergin 4, #24; G; 16–Safa anthology; ER; 17–Ergin 76, #181; G; 18–III, 1824ff; ONBW; 19–III, 1616ff; OHBW; 20–no ref.; B; 21–IV, 3818ff; SoR; 22–#1615; LT; 23–#611; SoR; 24–#1652; ER; 25–no ref.; B; 26–#1739; TL; 27–Ergin 11, #52; AYWR; 28–#2000; ER; 29–#1925; ER; 30–#423; SoR; 31–III, 212ff; SoR

August

1–Ergin 2, #79; G; 2–Ergin 8a, #22; G; 3–Ergin 8a, #25; SoR; 4–#602; SoR; 5–no ref.; B; 6–no ref.; B; 7–no ref.; B; 8–no ref.; B; 9–V, 4204ff; SIAY; 10–no ref.; B; 11–#304; SIAY; 12–#2894; ER; 13–no ref.; BoL; 14–no ref.; BoL; 15–#477; AYWR; 16–#477; AYWR; 17–III, 2526ff; AYWR; 18–II, 1303ff; AYWR; 19–no ref.; BoL; 20–Ergin 7b, #235; AYWR; 21–Ergin 7b, #235; AYWR; 22–V, 3409ff; WAT; 23–V, 3409ff; WAT; 24–#91; ER; 25–#911; LT; 26–#191; SIAY; 27–Ergin 8b, #135; 28–Ergin8b, #180; SoR; 29–I, 4000ff; SoR; 30–#1078; ER; 31–Ergin 2, #38; G

September

1–#2395; WAT; 2–V, 3292ff; DL; 3–V, 3292ff; DL; 4–Ergin 8b, #151; SoR; 5–III, 3884ff; SoR; 6–Ergin 8a, #55; SoR; 7–#1084; ER; 8–Ergin 8a, #62; SoR; 9–#152; ER; 10–IV, 3766ff; SoR; 11–III, 95ff; TL; 12–no ref.; BoL; 13–#681; ER; 14–#1373; LT; 15–#1373; LT; 16–V, 1080ff; OHBW; 17–IV, 1082ff; ER; 18–Arb.64a; ER; 19–#3079; ER; 20–VI, 3682ff; ER; 21–III, 3494ff; WAT; 22–III, 3494ff; WAT; 23–IV, 475ff; ER; 24–V, 1051ff; TL; 25–V, 1051ff; TL; 26–I, 3150; ER; 27–I, 3150; ER; 28–I, 3150; ER; 29–I, 3150; ER; 30–#100; SIAY

October

1–#1145, ER; 2–#1145, ER; 3–#158, ER; 4–no ref.; B; 5–no ref.; BoL; 6–Ergin 16, #139; AYWR; 7–#1001; ER; 8–IV, 745ff; SoR; 9–#798; ER; 10–#2195; ER; 11–III, 4735ff; ER; 12–Ergin 2, #69; G; 13–#2166; ER; 14–Ergin 9b, #223; G; 15–#2259; ER; 16–no ref.; B; 17–Ergin 4, #52; G; 18–Ergin 4, #52; G; 19–#167; ER; 20–#2449; ER; 21–no ref.; BoL; 22–Ergin 2, #80; G; 23–Ergin Mag 45, HSg 59, v740ff; G; 24–Ergin 2,#103; G; 25–Ergin 3, #111; G; 26–III, 4089ff; ER; 27–Ergin, unpub.; AYWR; 28–Arb. 19a; ER; 29–#2627; ER; 30–#494; ER; 31–Ergin Mag, HMM g284, v3864–69, 3873, g291, v3964, 3975, 3977; G

November

1–Ergin 2, #130; G; 2–#2015, ER; 3–Ergin 2, #111; G; 4–#317; ER; 5–#2832; ER; 6–#1937; ER; 7–III, 189ff; ER; 8–#1249; ER; 9–Ergin Mag, GD, 190; G; 10–#79; ER; 11–Ergin 2, #138; G; 12–Ergin 4, #1; G; 13–Ergin 4, #1; G; 14–#1125; ER; 15–VI, 1983ff; ER; 16–#318; ER; 17–#2987; ER; 18–III, 1259ff; ER; 19–Ergin 4, #93; G; 20–Ergin 3, #27; G; 21–Ergin 2, #79; G; 22–V, 3646ff; ER; 23–I, 2084ff; ER; 24–#2110; ER; 25–#807; ER; 26–#1793; WAT; 27–ND, #31; AYWR; 28–ND, #31; AYWR; 29–III, 3700ff; OHBW; 30–no ref.; BoL

December

1–III, 3669ff; OHBW; 2–no ref.; B; 3–Ergin 4, #45; G; 4–Ergin 4, ghazal #, v2390; G; 5–#2283; ER; 6–Ergin 7b, #181; G; 7–Ergin 7b, #181; 8–Ergin 7b, #161; G; 9–no ref.; B; 10–no ref.; BoL; 11–Ergin 8a, #31; SoR; 12–V, 477ff; ER; 13–Ergin 16, #140; AYWR; 14–Ergin 16, #140; AYWR; 15–III, 49ff; WAT; 16–V, 2632ff; TL; 17–V, 2632ff; 18–#1126; LT; 19–I, 2981ff; DL; 20–I, 2981ff; 21–III, 1284ff; SoR; 22–III, 2570ff; ER; 23–V, 1ff; DL; 24–no ref.; BoL; 25–#1091; ER; 26–#153; UR; 27–no ref.; B; 28–#425; ER; 29–Ergin 7a, #105; G; 30–RO, 93; SIAY; 31–RO, 93

SEARCHABLE TERMS

A Basket of Fresh Bread (1)

A Basket of Fresh Bread (2)

A Bowl

A Cleared Site

A Door

A Dumb Experiment

A Dying Dog

A Frog Deep in the Presence

A Full Bucket

A General Introductory Lecture

A Grape

A Great Rose Tree

A Great Wagon

A Just-Finishing Candle

A Lantern

A Mouse and a Frog (1)

A Mouse and a Frog (2)

A Night Full of Talking

A Piece of Wood

A Pilgrimage to a Person

A Poem in a Letter

A Single Brushstroke Down

A Small Green Island

A Star with No Name

A Subtle Truth

A Tender Agony of Parting

A Trace

A Turning Night

A Voice through the Door

A Way of Passing Away

A Wished-For Song

Again

Already Under

An Edge of Foam

An Egypt That Does Not Exist

An Elephant in the Dark

An Evolving Course

An Invisible Bee

As a Wick Does

As Much As a Pen Knows

Ashes, Wanderers

Autumn Rose Elegy

Awkward Comparisons

Backpain

Be Your Note

Behind Each Eye

Betrayal into Trust

Bewilderment

Beyond Love Stories (1)

Beyond Love Stories (2)

Birds Nesting Near the Coast

Birdsong from Inside the Egg

Birdwings

Blessing

Body Intelligence (1)

Body Intelligence (2)

Bonfire at Midnight

Bu’l-Hasan and the Snow

Buoyancy

Burnt Kabob

Certain Sunfish

Childhood Friends (1)

Childhood Friends (2)

Childhood Friends (3)

Childhood Friends (4)

Children Running Through

Childsplay

Consider What Choices

Constant Conversation

Cry Easily

Cry Out

Cuisine and Sex

Dance

Daring Enough to Finish

Dark Sweetness

Deliberation (1)

Deliberation (2)

Dervishes

Descend into the Pith

Dhu’l-Nun’s Instructive Madness

Different Loads

Discipline

Dissolver of Sugar

Don’t Let Your Throat Tighten

Emptiness

Empty

Entering the Shell

Escaping to the Forest

Evolutionary Intelligence

Farther and Farther from Zero

Fasting

Father Reason

Fierce Courtesy

Flood Residue

Flowers Open

Fog

For Us This Day

Give Me Someone

Gnats Inside the Wind

Gnostic Donkeys (1)

Gnostic Donkeys (2)

God in the Stew

Goldsmithing

Grainy Taste

Halfheartedness

Hallaj

Harsh Evidence

Having Nothing

He Is a Letter

Held Like This

Hoofbeats

Hoping to Be More Alive

How Minds Most Want to Be

How We Move Inside Grace (1)

How We Move Inside Grace (2)

How You Are with Me

Humble Living

Hunt Music

I Am Not

I Have Five Things to Say

I Have Such a Teacher

I Honor Those

I Met One Traveling

I See My Beauty in You

I, You, He, She, We

I’m Not Saying This Right

Imagining Is Like

In the Arc of Your Mallet

Inside a Country Dialect

Inside the Rose (1)

Inside the Rose (2)

Inside This River

Inside

Inward Sky (1)

Inward Sky (2)

It’s Afternoon

Jars of Springwater

Joseph

Judge a Moth by the Beauty of Its Candle

Lamp after Lamp

Let the Beauty We Love

Let Yourself Be Drawn

Light Building in the Pupil

Lightning

Like Light over This Plain

Lion of the Heart

Listening (1)

Listening (2)

Locked Out of Life

Longing

Looking for the Center

Looking into the Creek

Love and I Talking

Love Dogs

Love for Certain Work

Love Moves Away

Love’s Confusing Joy

Majesty and Helplessness

Mary’s Hiding

Meadowsounds

Medicine out of Pain

Messengers from the Mystery

Mirror and Face

More Range

Morning Water and a Poet

Morning Wind

Move Within

Music Master

My First Love Story

My Worst Habit

Neither This nor That

Night Prayer

No Better Love

No Flag

No Need to Ask

No Room for Form (1)

No Room for Form (2)

On Resurrection Day

On the Day I Die

One Song

One Swaying Being

One Transparent Sky

Only Breath (1)

Only Breath (2)

Only the Best

Our Caravan Bell

Our Closeness

Out Beyond

Out in Empty Sky

Out of Stillness

People Want You to Be Happy

Presences

Put This Design in Your Carpet (1)

Put This Design in Your Carpet (2)

Quietness

Ramadan Silence

Raw, Well-Cooked, and Burnt

Red Shirt

Red

Response to Your Question

Say Who I Am (1)

Say Who I Am (2)

Sheba’s Hesitation

Sheba’s Throne (1)

Sheba’s Throne (2)

Silkworms

Singing

Sky-Circles

Smoke

Some Song or Something

Someone Digging in the Ground

Something Opens Our Wings

Sometimes I Do

Soul, Heart, and Body One Morning

Sour, Doughy, Raw, and Numb

Spring Is Christ

Spring

Stingy Aloeswood

Stranded Somewhere

Strange Frenzy

Sublime Generosity (1)

Sublime Generosity (2)

Sufi Masters (1)

Sufi Masters (2)

Surrender

Talking through the Door (1)

Talking through the Door (2)

Tattooing in Qazwin (1)

Tattooing in Qazwin (2)

That Quick

The Arrow

The Breeze at Dawn

The Bright Core of Failure

The Buddhist Sufi

The Cat and the Meat (1)

The Cat and the Meat (2)

The Circle

The City of Saba (1)

The City of Saba (2)

The Death of Saladin

The Diver’s Clothes

The Doctor Who Comes

The Elegance of the Ermine

The Essence of Ritual

The Face

The Far Mosque

The Flower’s Eye

The Freshness

The Generations I Praise

The Gift of Water

The Grasses

The Great Untying

The Guest House

The Healing Presence

The Inner Workings

The King Inside

The King’s Lead-Camel

The Knots Untie (1)

The Knots Untie (2)

The Lame Goat

The Lord of All the East

The Lord of Beauty

The Many Wines

The Milk of Millenia

The Mill

The Miracle-Signs

The Moments You Have Lived

The Most Alive Moment

The Music

The Mystery of Presence

The Mystery of the Moment

The Night Ocean

The Nightingale’s Way

The Nightwatchman (1)

The Nightwatchman (2)

The Nothing of Roselight

The Old Poet’s Waking

The Old Woman and the Falcon

The Oldest Thirst There Is

The One Thing You Must Do

The Orchard

The Origin of the World

The Pickaxe (1)

The Pickaxe (2)

The Polisher

The Population of the World

The Price of Kissing

The Question (1)

The Question (2)

The Sacred Liquid

The Seed Market

The Self We Share

The Sight of a Soul

The Soul’s Friend

The Sun Is Love

The Sunrise Ruby

The Sweet Taste of Grief

The Taste of Morning

The Tent

The Treasure’s Nearness

The Tree of Awe

The Truest Devotion

The Uses of Fear

The Verge of Tears

The Vigil

The Visions of Daquqi (1)

The Visions of Daquqi (2)

The Visions of Daquqi (3)

The Visions of Daquqi (4)

The Wandering Kings

The Water You Want

The Waterwheel

The Way That Moves as You Move

The Way You Make Love

The Well

The Wide Plain of Death

The Worm’s Waking

The You Pronoun

There Is Some Kiss We Want

There Is Something in Us

These Lights

This Day

This Dove Here

This Fish Way

This Overflow

This Piece of Food

This Recklessness

This World Which Is Made of Our Love for Emptiness

Throat-Song

Too Happy, You Could Not Sleep Last Night

Two Kinds of Intelligence

Underwater in the Fountain

Undressing

Unfold Your Own Myth

Unmarked Boxes

Up to the Neck

Urgency

Uthman’s Silence

Value

Walnuts

Water and the Moon

Water from Your Spring

Wax

We Three

Wean Yourself

What I See in Your Eyes

What Is Love? Gratitude

What Jesus Runs From

What the Friend Wants Done

What Was Said to the Rose

What’s Not Here

Whatever Circles

Whatever Gives Pleasure

Whatever You Really See

When I Am with You

When Living Itself

When You Feel Your Lips

Who Makes These Changes?

Who Says Words with My Mouth

Whoever’s Calm and Sensible

You Are as You Are

You Are Most Handsome

Your Eyes

Your Face

Your Features

Your First Eyes

About the Author

COLEMAN BARKS is a renowned poet and the bestselling author of The Essential Rumi, The Soul of Rumi, Rumi: The Book of Love, and The Drowned Book. He was prominently featured in both of Bill Moyers’s PBS television series on poetry, The Language of Life and Fooling with Words. After having taught English and poetry at the University of Georgia for thirty years, he now focuses on writing, readings, and performances. Visit the author online at www.colemanbarks.com.

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Copyright

A YEAR WITH RUMI: Daily Readings. Copyright © 2006 by Coleman Barks. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Version 01182013

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Barks, Coleman.

A year with Rumi: daily readings / Coleman Barks.—1st ed.

p. cm.

Based on A. J. Arberry and R. A. Nicholson’s translations of Jalal al-Din Rumi’s poems and on Nevit Ergin’s work from the Turkish and John Moyne’s unpublished translations.

Includes index.

ISBN-13: 978–0–06–084597–1

ISBN-10: 0–06–084597–X

EPub Edition October 2006 ISBN 9780061757662

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