Sunday, January 31, 2010
insanity
I have lived on the lip
of insanity,
wanting to know reasons,
knocking on a door.
It opens.
I've been knocking from the inside!
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
spiritual window-shoppers
These spiritual window-shoppers,
who idly ask, 'How much is that?' Oh, I'm just looking.
They handle a hundred items and put them down,
shadows with no capital.
What is spent is love and two eyes wet with weeping.
But these walk into a shop,
and their whole lives pass suddenly in that moment,
in that shop.
Where did you go? "Nowhere."
What did you have to eat? "Nothing much."
Even if you don't know what you want,
buy _something,_ to be part of the exchanging flow.
Start a huge, foolish project,
like Noah.
what people think of you.
Rumi, 'We Are Three', Mathnawi VI, 831-845
Friday, January 15, 2010
say i'm you
I am the round sun.
To the bits of dust I say, Stay.
To the sun, Keep moving.
I am morning mist,
and the breathing of evening.
I am wind in the top of a grove,
and surf on the cliff.
Mast, rudder, helmsman, and keel,
I am also the coral reef they founder on.
I am a tree with a trained parrot in its branches.
Silence, thought, and voice.
The musical air coming through a flute,
a spark of stone, a flickering in metal.
Both candle and the moth crazy around it.
Rose, and the nightingale lost in the fragrance.
I am all orders of being, the circling galaxy,
the evolutionary intelligence, the lift, and the falling away.
What is, and what isn't.
You who know, Jelaluddin,
You the one in all, say who I am.
Say I am you.