I thank God with all my heart
for the gifts he has given mankind.
Uncountable are his miracles, immeasurable his love…
He has filled each day with his splendor
and given us eyes to see,
hearts that can comprehend,
spirits that stand in awe.
Also he has permitted us
knowledge beyond our wisdom,
and has granted us, in our unripeness,
the power to destroy the earth.
I praise his fathomless mercy
and thank him for his difficult grace…
from “Soul of Rumi”
Wind is no different from the portion of air you direct with a fan, your purpose is there in the air. Wind moves like breath, sometimes speaking praise, sometimes satire. A breath-wind lives in you, so that you may know other winds: kindness in spring, winter cruelty; at harvest the wind does winnowing. Ships under sail pray for it. Wind of toothache, push of childbirth, victory… Wind is the motion of creation, body moved by spirit.
So… after a long absence, the lover moves to the beloved, reaching to hold and kiss her.
“More courtesy, please!” she says.
“But no one is here, only the light wind. You and I are alone, and I am so thirsty!”
“Don’t talk this foolishness. If a wind moves, there must be presence coming through.”
The lover replies, “I may be foolish with this reaching for you, but at least I’m not standoffish.”
Rumi & Coleman B. from “Soul of Rumi”
My academic training, at Berkeley and Chapel Hill, was in modern literature. I wrote a dissertation on Conrad and taught twentieth-century American poetry courses and creative writing at the University of Georgia in Athens for years. I had never even heard Rumi’s name until 1976, when Robert Bly handed me a copy of A. J. Arberry’s translations, saying, “These poems need to be released from their cages.”
How any translator chooses to work on one poet, and not on others, is a mysterious thing. Some attunement must be there. I felt drawn immediately to the spaciousness and longing in Rumi’s poetry. I began to explore this new world, rephrasing Arberry’s English. I sent some early attempts to a friend, Milner Ball, who was teaching law at Rutgers-Camden. He, inexplicably, read them to his torts class. A young law student, Jonathan Granoff, came up afterward, asked him for my address, and started writing, urging me to come meet his teacher in Philadelphia.
In September of 1978 when I finally did walk into the room where the Sri Lankan saint Bawa Muhaiyaddeen sat on his bed talking to a small group, I realized that I had met this man in a dream the year before. Here’s the dream from May 2, 1977, my holy day: I am sleeping out on the bluff above the Tennessee River where I grew up. I wake inside the dream, still asleep, but awake in the sleeping bag I’m in. A ball of light rises from Williams Island and comes over me. I think it’s a UFO; then it clarifies from the center out, revealing a man sitting cross-legged with head bowed and eyes closed, a white shawl over the back of his head. He raises his head and opens his eyes. I love you, he says. I love you too, I answer. The landscape, that beautiful curve of river, feels suddenly drenched with dew, and I know that the wetness is love. I felt the process of the dew forming and I knew, somehow, what the essence of it was.
When I visited him in Philadelphia, Bawa told me to continue the Rumi work. “It has to be done.” But, he cautioned, “If you work on the words of a gnani, you must become a gnani,” a master. I did not become one of those, but for nine years, for four or five intervals during each year, I was in the presence of one.
Rumi says,
Mind does its fine-tuning hair-splitting,
but no craft or art begins
or can continue without a master
giving wisdom into it…
Moon and evening star do their
slow tambourine dance to praise
this universe. The purpose of
every gathering is discovered:
to recognize beauty and love
what’s beautiful. “Once it was
like that, now it’s like this,”
the saying goes around town, and
serious consequences too. Men
and women turn their faces to the
wall in grief. They lose appetite.
Then they start eating the fire of
pleasure, as camels chew pungent
grass for the sake of their souls…
Rumi, from “Bowls of food”
Some clouds do not obscure the moon, and there are mornings
when drops of rain descent
from an open sky. A saint is a cloud that’s here, but
with its cloud nature
erased. Something in us wants no intermediary, no nurse,
just to be the wide blue
merged with the mothers breast, sublime emptiness. There
is a way of leaving the
world that nourishes the world. Don’t do anything for
applause…
What you are is a soul
that is both food and hunger, longing and what the
longing is for. Remember
that, and try then to experience renunciation.
It takes the courage of inner majesty
to stand in this doorway, where there’s
no celebrating good fortune, where talk
of luck is embarrassing. However your
robe of patches fits is right. If you
are God’s light, keep moving east to
west as you have been. Don’t pretend
something other than truth. Measuring
devices don’t work in this room where
the love dervishes meet. No tradition
grows here and no soup simmers! We sit
in pure absence without expectation.
Rumi “Love dervishes”