Rumi the big red book, p.5
Rumi, The Big Red Book, page 5
and yet we run away?
THE WINE VAT’S LID
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 then 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 and 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 that worships love.
A 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 still you.
Sometimes the sleek arrow.
Other times, a worn leather thumbguard.
You bring me where everything circles.
And now as you put the lid back on the wine vat, pure quiet.
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.
A COMMUNITY OF THE SPIRIT
There is a community of the spirit.
Join it, and feel the delight
of walking in the noisy street
and being the noise.
Drink all your passion and be a disgrace.
Close both eyes to see with the other eye.
Open your hands if you want to be held.
Consider what you have been doing.
Why do you stay
with such a mean-spirited and dangerous partner?
For the security of having food. Admit it.
Here is a better arrangement.
Give up this life, and get a hundred new lives.
Sit down in this circle.
Quit acting like a wolf,
and feel the shepherd’s love filling you.
At night, your beloved wanders.
Do not take painkillers.
Tonight, no consolations.
And do not eat.
Close your mouth against food.
Taste the lover’s mouth in yours.
You moan, But she left me. He left me.
Twenty more will come.
Be empty of worrying.
Think of who created thought.
Why do you stay in prison
when the door is so wide open?
Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking.
Live in silence.
Flow down and down
in always widening rings of being.
NO ORDINARY FRIENDSHIP
Soul so close, whatever you think of I know,
but I want more convincing proof.
Do not arrive and say, Now I am here.
Our closeness is not like that.
I am a support column in your house,
a waterspout on your roof.
I share with you the secrets
that others will tell on their last day.
This is no ordinary friendship.
I attend your banquet as wine is passed around the table.
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 saying,
I can deliver you from yourself in this moment.
Now lover and beloved grow quiet.
My mouth is burning with sweetness.
AT HOME IN BOTH PLACES
I never get enough of laughing with you, this wild humor.
Thirsty and dry, I complain,
but everything is made of water.
Lonely, yet my head leans against your shirt.
My wounded hands are your hands.
Do something drastic.
You say, Come and sit in the innermost room,
where you will be safe from the love-thief.
I reply, But I have tried to be the ring knocker on your door,
so you will not have to be always letting me in and out.
You say, No. You stand on the threshold waiting,
and you are here in the inner chamber too.
You are at home in both places.
I love the quietness of such an answer.
Come to this table of quietness.
Chapter 3
Al-Batin, The Hidden
There are invisible aspects to being sentient and embodied. Consciousness is invisible. Love is invisible. Both are immeasurable. Placed and passionate, cool and in motion, we move along, earthy and pure soul. There is a voice inside the green. What have you not seen? We change, and see differently. Mystery is everywhere. Do not try to find the meanings. There is a hiding implicit in creation. Something is always being concealed. Never think you know what that is, though laughter says a lot about it. The heart is the secret inside the secret. You can never say, or know, what is concealed inside you.
THE LIVING DOUBLENESS
I ask my heart, Why do you keep looking
for the delights of love?
I hear the answer back, Why will you not join me
in this companionship?
This is the conversation of being a human being,
the living doubleness.
Cool and in motion like water,
placed and passionate like fire.
Subtle as wind, yet obvious
as a wine glass poured to the brim,
spilled over and drunk down
all at once for a toast.
Like rain, you make any image more vivid.
Like a mirror, you can be trusted to hold beauty.
There are mean people who see only meanness
reflected in your beauty, but they are wrong.
You are pure soul
and made of the ground.
You are eyeshadow
and the kindness in eyelight.
A ruby from no telling which mine,
let yourself be set in a seal ring.
Lift the sword-discernment
that rules a thousand compassions.
Shams in the lovely shape of Shams,
spring-source of invisible meaning.
GREEN FROM INSIDE1
The moon comes to visit as a guest of the night.
Rose sits down by thorn.
Someone washing clothes asks for the sun’s forgiveness.
Compass leg circles the point.
Muhammad arrives here a stranger,
spring to this dry tree. Hallaj smiles at his cross.
The pomegranate flowers.
Everyone talks about greenery, not with words,
but quietly, as green itself talks from inside,
as we begin to live our love.
SALADIN2
The heart sees the joy of early dawn, the breeze.
What have you seen? What have you not seen?
Sometimes to plunge into a bewilderment ocean.
Sometimes, to find the gray amber of whales
deep in the mountains. Hundreds of windows.
Haze returns into the sea.
My weeping eyes, wave by wave, mix with the ocean.
It becomes an eye.
Both worlds, a single corn grain in front of a great rooster.
One who wants, one who is wanted, the same.
Who knows God? Someone through with La. No.
The broken lover knows about this.
Nobody in this robe but God.
Appear as you truly are, Saladin.
You are my soul, the eye that sees God.
HARVEST
As the sun goes down in the well,
lovers enter the seclusion of God.
Later at night we meet like thieves
who have stolen gold, our candlelit faces.
A pawn has become king.
We sit secretly inside the presence
like a Turk in a tent among Hindus,
and yet we are traveling past a hundred watchmen,
night-faring, drowned in an ocean of longing.
Sometimes a body rises to the surface
like Joseph coming out of his well of abandonment
to be the clarity that divides Egypt’s wheat fairly
and interprets the royal dreaming.
Some people say about human beings, Dust to dust,
But how can that be true of one
who changes road dust to doorway?
The crop appears to be one thing
when it is still in the field.
Then the transformation time comes,
and we see how it is half chaff, half grain.
SEE WHAT YOU HAVE DESPISED IN YOURSELF
They are here with us now,
those who saddle a new unbroken colt every morning
and ride the seven levels of the sky,
who lay down at night with the sun and moon for pillows.
Each of these fish has a Jonah inside.
They sweeten the bitter sea.
They shape-shift the mountains,
but with their actions neither bless nor curse.
They are more obvious,
and yet more secret than that.
Mix grains from the ground they walk with streamwater.
Put that salve on your eyes and you will see
what you have despised in yourself
as a thorn opens into a rose.
CLIMB TO THE EXECUTION PLACE
Grief settles thick in the throat and lungs:
thousands of sorrows being suffered, clouds of cruelty,
all somehow from love.
Wail and be thirsty for your own blood.
Climb to the execution place. It is time.
The Nile flows red. The Nile flows pure.
Dry thorns and aloes wood are the same,
until fire touches.
A warrior and a mean coward stand here similar,
until arrows rain.
Warriors love battle. A subtle lion with strategy
gets the prey to run toward him saying, Kill me again.
Dead eyes look into living eyes.
Do not try to figure this out.
Love’s work looks absurd,
but trying to find a meaning will hide it more.
Silence.
TO THE EXTENT THEY CAN DIE3
A Chinese mirror shows all sides of a human being.
That is the one for you.
Someone born deaf has no more use for high notes
than newborn babies for a fine merlot.
What would a land bird be doing out over open sea?
We are rinds thrown out by the tavern of absolute absence,
unconcerned about profits, or dowry, or what to wear.
We are a hundred thousand years beyond insanity.
Plato does not speak of this.
The physical beauty of men and women is not an image here.
Lovers are alive to the extent that they can die.
A great soul approaches Shams, What are you doing here?
Answer: What is there to do?
BROOM WORK
If every heart had such a private road into the friend as this,
there would be a garden bench on the tip of every thorn.
Every grief would be an exuberance.
Flame-colored souls enjoy each other.
Lightning stands doorkeeper for the full moon.
If it did not, the sky’s shifting
would start to occur on the ground.
If legs and feet and wings took us to the beloved,
every atom would become such transportation.
If everyone could see what love is,
each would set up a tentpole in the ocean.
The world’s population pitched and living
easily within the sea.
What if inside every lover’s tear you saw the face of the friend,
Muhammad, Jesus, Buddha, the impossible-possible
philosopher, the glass diamond one, Shams Tabriz?
A friendship fire dissolves divisions.
Yesterday becomes tomorrow.
Stay low and lower under the green roof.
Keep sweeping the floor.
That broom work keeps a brilliance covered
that would confuse us more than we can stand.
BACK INTO THE REEDBED
Time to ignore sensible advice,
to untie the knots our culture ties us with.
Cut to the quick.
Put cotton in both sentimental ears.
Go back into the reedbed.
Let cane sugar rise again in you.
No rules or daily duties.
Those do not bring the peace of silence.
BOWLS OF FOOD
Moon and evening star
do their slow tambourine dance to praise this universe.
The purpose of every gathering is discovered:
To recognize beauty and to love what is beautiful.
Once it was like that. Now it is like this.
So 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.
Winter blocks the road. Flowers are taken prisoner underground.
Then green justice tenders a spear.
Go outside to the orchard.
These visitors came a long way, past all the houses of the zodiac,
learning something new at each stop.
And they are here for such a short time,
sitting at these tables set on the prow of the wind.
Bowls of food are brought out as answers,
but still no one knows the answer.
Food for the soul stays secret.
Body food gets put out in the open like us.
Those who work at a bakery do not know the taste of bread
like the hungry beggars do.
Because the beloved wants to know,
unseen things become manifest.
Hiding is the hidden purpose of creation.
Bury your seed and wait.
After you die, all the thoughts you had
will throng around like children.
The heart is the secret inside the secret.
Call the secret language, and never be sure what you conceal.
It is the unsure people who get the blessing.
The lifting limbs of the cypress, opening rose, nightingale song,
fruit, these are inside the chill November wind.
They are its secret.
We climb and fall so often. Plants have an inner being,
and separate ways of talking and feeling.
An ear of corn bends in thought. Tulip, so embarrassed.
Pink rose deciding to open a competing store.
A bunch of grapes sits with its feet stuck out.
Narcissus gossiping about iris.
Willow, what do you learn from running water? Humility.
Red apple, what has the friend taught you? To be sour.
Peach tree, why so low? To let you reach.
Look at the poplar, tall, but without fruit or flower.
Yes, if I had those, I would be self-absorbed like you.
I gave up self to watch the enlightened ones.
Pomegranate questions quince. Why so pale?
For the pearl you hid inside me.
How did you discover my secret? Your laugh.
The core of the seen and the unseen universes smiles,
but remember, smiles come best from those who weep.
Lightning, then the rain-laughter.
Dark earth receives that clear, then grows a trunk.
Melon and cucumber come dragging along on pilgrimage.
You have to be to be blessed.
Pumpkin begins climbing a rope. Where did he learn that?
Grass, thorns, a thousand ants and snakes,
everything is looking for food. Don’t you hear the noise?
Every herb cures some illness. Camels delight to eat thorns.
We prefer the inside of a walnut, not the shell.
THE WINE VAT’S LID
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 then 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 and 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 that worships love.
A 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 still you.
Sometimes the sleek arrow.
Other times, a worn leather thumbguard.
You bring me where everything circles.
And now as you put the lid back on the wine vat, pure quiet.
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.
A COMMUNITY OF THE SPIRIT
There is a community of the spirit.
Join it, and feel the delight
of walking in the noisy street
and being the noise.
Drink all your passion and be a disgrace.
Close both eyes to see with the other eye.
Open your hands if you want to be held.
Consider what you have been doing.
Why do you stay
with such a mean-spirited and dangerous partner?
For the security of having food. Admit it.
Here is a better arrangement.
Give up this life, and get a hundred new lives.
Sit down in this circle.
Quit acting like a wolf,
and feel the shepherd’s love filling you.
At night, your beloved wanders.
Do not take painkillers.
Tonight, no consolations.
And do not eat.
Close your mouth against food.
Taste the lover’s mouth in yours.
You moan, But she left me. He left me.
Twenty more will come.
Be empty of worrying.
Think of who created thought.
Why do you stay in prison
when the door is so wide open?
Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking.
Live in silence.
Flow down and down
in always widening rings of being.
NO ORDINARY FRIENDSHIP
Soul so close, whatever you think of I know,
but I want more convincing proof.
Do not arrive and say, Now I am here.
Our closeness is not like that.
I am a support column in your house,
a waterspout on your roof.
I share with you the secrets
that others will tell on their last day.
This is no ordinary friendship.
I attend your banquet as wine is passed around the table.
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 saying,
I can deliver you from yourself in this moment.
Now lover and beloved grow quiet.
My mouth is burning with sweetness.
AT HOME IN BOTH PLACES
I never get enough of laughing with you, this wild humor.
Thirsty and dry, I complain,
but everything is made of water.
Lonely, yet my head leans against your shirt.
My wounded hands are your hands.
Do something drastic.
You say, Come and sit in the innermost room,
where you will be safe from the love-thief.
I reply, But I have tried to be the ring knocker on your door,
so you will not have to be always letting me in and out.
You say, No. You stand on the threshold waiting,
and you are here in the inner chamber too.
You are at home in both places.
I love the quietness of such an answer.
Come to this table of quietness.
Chapter 3
Al-Batin, The Hidden
There are invisible aspects to being sentient and embodied. Consciousness is invisible. Love is invisible. Both are immeasurable. Placed and passionate, cool and in motion, we move along, earthy and pure soul. There is a voice inside the green. What have you not seen? We change, and see differently. Mystery is everywhere. Do not try to find the meanings. There is a hiding implicit in creation. Something is always being concealed. Never think you know what that is, though laughter says a lot about it. The heart is the secret inside the secret. You can never say, or know, what is concealed inside you.
THE LIVING DOUBLENESS
I ask my heart, Why do you keep looking
for the delights of love?
I hear the answer back, Why will you not join me
in this companionship?
This is the conversation of being a human being,
the living doubleness.
Cool and in motion like water,
placed and passionate like fire.
Subtle as wind, yet obvious
as a wine glass poured to the brim,
spilled over and drunk down
all at once for a toast.
Like rain, you make any image more vivid.
Like a mirror, you can be trusted to hold beauty.
There are mean people who see only meanness
reflected in your beauty, but they are wrong.
You are pure soul
and made of the ground.
You are eyeshadow
and the kindness in eyelight.
A ruby from no telling which mine,
let yourself be set in a seal ring.
Lift the sword-discernment
that rules a thousand compassions.
Shams in the lovely shape of Shams,
spring-source of invisible meaning.
GREEN FROM INSIDE1
The moon comes to visit as a guest of the night.
Rose sits down by thorn.
Someone washing clothes asks for the sun’s forgiveness.
Compass leg circles the point.
Muhammad arrives here a stranger,
spring to this dry tree. Hallaj smiles at his cross.
The pomegranate flowers.
Everyone talks about greenery, not with words,
but quietly, as green itself talks from inside,
as we begin to live our love.
SALADIN2
The heart sees the joy of early dawn, the breeze.
What have you seen? What have you not seen?
Sometimes to plunge into a bewilderment ocean.
Sometimes, to find the gray amber of whales
deep in the mountains. Hundreds of windows.
Haze returns into the sea.
My weeping eyes, wave by wave, mix with the ocean.
It becomes an eye.
Both worlds, a single corn grain in front of a great rooster.
One who wants, one who is wanted, the same.
Who knows God? Someone through with La. No.
The broken lover knows about this.
Nobody in this robe but God.
Appear as you truly are, Saladin.
You are my soul, the eye that sees God.
HARVEST
As the sun goes down in the well,
lovers enter the seclusion of God.
Later at night we meet like thieves
who have stolen gold, our candlelit faces.
A pawn has become king.
We sit secretly inside the presence
like a Turk in a tent among Hindus,
and yet we are traveling past a hundred watchmen,
night-faring, drowned in an ocean of longing.
Sometimes a body rises to the surface
like Joseph coming out of his well of abandonment
to be the clarity that divides Egypt’s wheat fairly
and interprets the royal dreaming.
Some people say about human beings, Dust to dust,
But how can that be true of one
who changes road dust to doorway?
The crop appears to be one thing
when it is still in the field.
Then the transformation time comes,
and we see how it is half chaff, half grain.
SEE WHAT YOU HAVE DESPISED IN YOURSELF
They are here with us now,
those who saddle a new unbroken colt every morning
and ride the seven levels of the sky,
who lay down at night with the sun and moon for pillows.
Each of these fish has a Jonah inside.
They sweeten the bitter sea.
They shape-shift the mountains,
but with their actions neither bless nor curse.
They are more obvious,
and yet more secret than that.
Mix grains from the ground they walk with streamwater.
Put that salve on your eyes and you will see
what you have despised in yourself
as a thorn opens into a rose.
CLIMB TO THE EXECUTION PLACE
Grief settles thick in the throat and lungs:
thousands of sorrows being suffered, clouds of cruelty,
all somehow from love.
Wail and be thirsty for your own blood.
Climb to the execution place. It is time.
The Nile flows red. The Nile flows pure.
Dry thorns and aloes wood are the same,
until fire touches.
A warrior and a mean coward stand here similar,
until arrows rain.
Warriors love battle. A subtle lion with strategy
gets the prey to run toward him saying, Kill me again.
Dead eyes look into living eyes.
Do not try to figure this out.
Love’s work looks absurd,
but trying to find a meaning will hide it more.
Silence.
TO THE EXTENT THEY CAN DIE3
A Chinese mirror shows all sides of a human being.
That is the one for you.
Someone born deaf has no more use for high notes
than newborn babies for a fine merlot.
What would a land bird be doing out over open sea?
We are rinds thrown out by the tavern of absolute absence,
unconcerned about profits, or dowry, or what to wear.
We are a hundred thousand years beyond insanity.
Plato does not speak of this.
The physical beauty of men and women is not an image here.
Lovers are alive to the extent that they can die.
A great soul approaches Shams, What are you doing here?
Answer: What is there to do?
BROOM WORK
If every heart had such a private road into the friend as this,
there would be a garden bench on the tip of every thorn.
Every grief would be an exuberance.
Flame-colored souls enjoy each other.
Lightning stands doorkeeper for the full moon.
If it did not, the sky’s shifting
would start to occur on the ground.
If legs and feet and wings took us to the beloved,
every atom would become such transportation.
If everyone could see what love is,
each would set up a tentpole in the ocean.
The world’s population pitched and living
easily within the sea.
What if inside every lover’s tear you saw the face of the friend,
Muhammad, Jesus, Buddha, the impossible-possible
philosopher, the glass diamond one, Shams Tabriz?
A friendship fire dissolves divisions.
Yesterday becomes tomorrow.
Stay low and lower under the green roof.
Keep sweeping the floor.
That broom work keeps a brilliance covered
that would confuse us more than we can stand.
BACK INTO THE REEDBED
Time to ignore sensible advice,
to untie the knots our culture ties us with.
Cut to the quick.
Put cotton in both sentimental ears.
Go back into the reedbed.
Let cane sugar rise again in you.
No rules or daily duties.
Those do not bring the peace of silence.
BOWLS OF FOOD
Moon and evening star
do their slow tambourine dance to praise this universe.
The purpose of every gathering is discovered:
To recognize beauty and to love what is beautiful.
Once it was like that. Now it is like this.
So 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.
Winter blocks the road. Flowers are taken prisoner underground.
Then green justice tenders a spear.
Go outside to the orchard.
These visitors came a long way, past all the houses of the zodiac,
learning something new at each stop.
And they are here for such a short time,
sitting at these tables set on the prow of the wind.
Bowls of food are brought out as answers,
but still no one knows the answer.
Food for the soul stays secret.
Body food gets put out in the open like us.
Those who work at a bakery do not know the taste of bread
like the hungry beggars do.
Because the beloved wants to know,
unseen things become manifest.
Hiding is the hidden purpose of creation.
Bury your seed and wait.
After you die, all the thoughts you had
will throng around like children.
The heart is the secret inside the secret.
Call the secret language, and never be sure what you conceal.
It is the unsure people who get the blessing.
The lifting limbs of the cypress, opening rose, nightingale song,
fruit, these are inside the chill November wind.
They are its secret.
We climb and fall so often. Plants have an inner being,
and separate ways of talking and feeling.
An ear of corn bends in thought. Tulip, so embarrassed.
Pink rose deciding to open a competing store.
A bunch of grapes sits with its feet stuck out.
Narcissus gossiping about iris.
Willow, what do you learn from running water? Humility.
Red apple, what has the friend taught you? To be sour.
Peach tree, why so low? To let you reach.
Look at the poplar, tall, but without fruit or flower.
Yes, if I had those, I would be self-absorbed like you.
I gave up self to watch the enlightened ones.
Pomegranate questions quince. Why so pale?
For the pearl you hid inside me.
How did you discover my secret? Your laugh.
The core of the seen and the unseen universes smiles,
but remember, smiles come best from those who weep.
Lightning, then the rain-laughter.
Dark earth receives that clear, then grows a trunk.
Melon and cucumber come dragging along on pilgrimage.
You have to be to be blessed.
Pumpkin begins climbing a rope. Where did he learn that?
Grass, thorns, a thousand ants and snakes,
everything is looking for food. Don’t you hear the noise?
Every herb cures some illness. Camels delight to eat thorns.
We prefer the inside of a walnut, not the shell.
