Eyewitness to the Truth ...
> We donate a cloak to the man who does the washing. We feel proud of our generosity. We stare at the infinite, suffering ocean. We fall in! > > Wandering the high empty plain for some indication you've been here, I find an abandoned body, a detached head. > > Sometimes visible, sometimes not, sometimes devout Christians, sometimes staunchly Jewish. Until our inner love fits into everyone, all we can do is take daily these different shapes! > > Sometimes afraid of reunion, sometimes of separation: You and I, so fond of the notion of YOU and an I, should live as though we'd never heard those pronouns. > > You were alone, I got you to sing. You were quiet, I made you tell long stories. No one knew who you were, they do now! > > Don't come to us without bringing music. We celebrate with drum and flute, with Wine not made from grapes, in a place you cannot imagine. > > I stand up, and this one of me turns into a hundred of me! They say I circle around you. Nonsense. I circle around me. > > What I most want is to spring out of this personality, then to sit apart from that leaping. I've lived too long where I can be reached! > > Lightning, your presence from ground to sky! No one knows what becomes of me, when you take me so quickly! > > The wine forbidden in this place creates life for the inner being. Fill with that and forget consequences. There's no beginning or end! > > Love comes sailing through and I scream. Love sits beside me like a private supply of itself. Love puts away the musical instruments, and takes off the silk robes. Our nakedness together changes me completely. > > - those are quatrains of rumi written ca 1330 southeastern turkey, early in the empire of the turks part of a persecuted mystic sect writing to his great love, assassinated by the orthodox thought police rumi wrote 22000 quatrains like that all after his love was killed, in memory > > The one who floods the private sanctuary I've built, who takes away sleep, who drags and throws me under, that presence is the joy I speak! > The center clears. Knowing comes: the body is not singular like a corpse, but singular like a salt grain still in the side of the mountain. > The light you give off did not come from a pelvis. Your features did not begin in semen. Don't try to hide inside anger radiance that cannot be hidden. > All day and night, music. a quiet, bright reedsong; If it fades we fade. > Sleep this year has no authority! Night might as well stop looking for us when we're like this, invisible - except at dawn! > This night extends into eternity, like a fire burning inside the Friend. Truly knowing this is what joy is! Forgetting it is grief, and a lack of courage. > Days are sieves to filter spirit, reveal impurities, and too, show the light of some who throw their own shining into the universe! > Out of nowhere a horse brought us here where we taste love until we don't exist again! This taste is the wine we always mention. > Earlier, to be ready, I loosened the leg bindings. Today, your scent. Gratefulness rises on the air. > These gifts from the Friend, a robe ok skin and veins, a teacher within, wear them and become a school, with a greater Sheikh nearby. > There is no companion but love. No starting, or finishing, yet, a road. The Friend calls from there: WHY DO YOU HESITATE WHEN LIVES ARE IN DANGER! > I pretended to leap to see if I could live THERE. Someday I must actually arrive THERE, or nothing will be left to arrive. > Here's a magnificent person holding out a glass of wine, a vision of power. OVER me, I hope, not FOR me! > Let the lover be disgraceful, crazy, absentminded. Somebody sober will worry about events going badly! Let the lover be. > The manner and appearance of a prophet, our secret origins, these are born of a woman who still lives inside you, though she's hiding from what we've become. > If you have a spirit, lose it, loose it to return where with one word, we came from. Now, thousands of words, and we refuse to leave. > If you want to live, leave your banks, as a small stream enters the Oxus, miles wide, or as cattle moving around a millstone suddenly circle to the top of the sphere. > Life is ending? God gives another. Admit the finite. Praise the Infinite! Love is a spring. Submerge! Every separate drop, a new life. > >. ...
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