Some Rumi

Acts of helplessness
Here are the miracle-signs you want: that
you cry thruogh the night and get up dawn, asking,
that in the absence of what you ask for your day gets dark,
your neck thin as a spindle, that what you give away
is all you own, that you sacrifice belongings,
sleep, health, your head, that you often
sit down in a fire like aloes wood, and often go out
to meet a blade like a battered helmet.

When an act of helplessness becomes habitual,
those are the signs.

But you run back and forth listening for unsual events,
peering into the faces of travellers.
"Why are you looking at me like a madman?"
I have lost a friend. Please forgive me.

Searching like that does not fail.
There will come a rider who holds you close.
You faint and gibber. The uninitiated say, "He's faking."
How could they now?
Water washes over beached fish, the water
of those signs I mentioned.

Excuse my wandering.
How can one be orderly with this?
It's like counting leaves in a garden,
along with the song-notes of partridges,
and crows.
                Sometimes organisation
and computation become absurd.

The world which is made of our love for emptiness
Praise to the emptiness that blanks out existence. Existence:
this place made from our love for that emptiness!
Yet somehow comes empitness,
this existence goes.
Praise be to that happening, over and over!

For years I pulled my own existence out of emptiness.
Then one swoop, one swing of the arm,
that work is over.
Free of who I was, free of presence, free of
dangerous fear, hope,
free of mountainous wanting.

The here-and-now mountain is a tiny piece of a piece
of straw
blown off into empitness.

These words I'm saying so much begin to lose meaning:
existence, empitiness, mountain, straw: words
and what they try to say swept
out the window, down the slant of the roof.

                                                                                  -- Jalaluddin Rumi

Comments

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