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 coordinated as bird wings.

- Rumi

Light

The lamps are different,
But the light is the same.
So many garish lamps in the dying brain's lamp-shop,
Forget about them.
Concentrate on essence, concentrate on Light
In lucid bliss, calmly smoking off its own holy fire,
The Light streams towards you from all things,
All people, all possible permutation of good, evil, thought, passion.
The lamps are different,
But the Light is the same.
One matter, one energy, one Light, one Light-mind,
Endlessly emanating all things
One turning and burning diamond.
One, one, one.
Ground yourself, strip yourself down,
To blind loving silence.
Stay there, until you see
You are gazing at the Light
With its own ageless eyes.

- Rumi

Listening from the Heart

From the one heart...

Hear from the heart wordless mysteries!
Understand what cannot be understood...
In our stone-dark hearts there burns a fire
That burns all veils to their root and foundation,
When the veils are burned away,
the heart will understand completely...
Ancient Love will unfold ever-fresh forms
In the heart of the Spirit, in the core of the heart.

- Rumi

Solitude and Solitary

"You need not leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. You need not even listen, simply wait, just learn to become quiet, and still, and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked. It has no choice; it will roll in ecstasy at your feet."  Rumi

Love

Inside you are sweet beyond telling,
and the cathedral there,
so deeply tall.


~Rumi

Death

Death comes,
and what we thought we needed loses importance.

~Rumi

Flowing Souls

Some souls flow like clear water.
They pour into our veins and feel like wine.

I give in to that. I fall flat.
We can sail this ship lying down.

~Rumi

Transformation

"To change, you must face the dragon of your appetites with another dragon: the life-energy of the soul" ~ Rumi

Real Love

"A thousand half-loves must be forsaken to take one whole heart home."  Rumi

Don't Be Satisfied

"Don't be satisfied with stories,
how things have gone for others.
Unfold your own myth,
Without complicated explanation...
Stark walking...
Your legs will get heavy and tired.
Then comes the moment
Of feeling the wings you've grown,
Lifting."

Rumi

The Warrior's Way

"A self-sacrificing way,
but also a warrior's way, and not
for brittle people, easily broken, glass bottle people.
The soul's tested here by sheer terror,
as a sieve sifts and separates
genuine from fake.
And this road is full of footprints!
Companions have come before.
They are your ladder
Use them!
Without them you won't have the spirit-quickness
you need.  Even a dumb donkey
crossing a desert
becomes nimble-footed
with others of its kind.
Stay with the caravan.  By yourself,
you'll get a hundred times more tired,
and fall behind."  

Rumi

Open Heart

To Open Toward the Heart

Today, like every day,
we are ruined and lonely.

...Don't retreat,
fleeing your emptiness
through the doorway of thinking.

Try making some music instead.

There are hundreds of ways
to kneel in prayer —hundreds of ways to open
toward the heart of the Friend's beauty.

~Maulana Rumi

Translated by David and Sabrineh Fideler

Religion

"I am neither Christian, nor Jewish, nor Muslim.
Doing away with duality, I saw the two worlds as one.
I seek One, I know One, I see One, and I call One."
~Rumi

Joy

"Let yourself be silently drawn, by the strongest pull of what you really love."  Rumi

Loneliness

Today, like every day,
we are ruined and lonely.

Don't retreat,
fleeing your emptiness
through the doorway
of thinking.

Try making some music instead.

There are hundreds of ways
to kneel in prayer —
hundreds of ways to open
toward the heart
of the Friend's beauty.

~Maulana Rumi

Parenting

THE WAY WINGS SHOULD

What will
our children do in the morning?
Will they wake with their hearts wanting to play,
...the way wings
should?

Will they have dreamed the needed flights and gathered
the strength from the planets that all men and women need to balance
the wonderful charms of
the earth

so that her power and beauty does not make us forget our own?

I know all about the ways of the heart - how it wants to be alive.

Love so needs to love
that it will endure almost anything, even abuse,
just to flicker for a moment. But the sky's mouth is kind,
its song will never hurt you, for I
sing those words.

What will our children do in the morning
if they do not see us
fly?

~ Rumi ~

Rumi

"I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not complete the last one
...but I give myself to it."  Rumi

Beloved

In truth everything and everyone
Is a shadow of the Beloved,
And our seeking is His seeking
And our words are His words ...
We search for Him here and there,
...While looking right at Him.
Sitting by His side, we ask:
"O Beloved, where is the Beloved?"
-Rumi

Real Love

Subtle Degrees
Rumi

subtle degrees
of domination and servitude
are what you know as love

but love is different
it arrives complete
just there
like the moon in the window

like the sun
of neither east nor west
nor of anyplace

when that sun arrives
east and west arrive

desire only that
of which you have no hope
seek only that
of which you have no clue

love is the sea of not-being
and there intellect drowns

this is not the Oxus River
or some little creek
this is the shoreless sea;
here swimming ends
always in drowning

a journey to the sea
is horses and fodder
and contrivance
but at land’s end
the footsteps vanish

you lift up your robe
so as not to wet the hem;
come! drown in this sea
a thousand times

the moon passes over the
ocean of non-being

droplets of spray tear loose
and fall back
on the cresting waves

a million galaxies
are a little scum
on that shoreless sea

Love

"Through love all pain will turn to medicine."   ~ Rumi