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”