Moar Rumi

"Drunkenly asleep, tenderly awake, clouded with grief, laughing like lightning, angry at war, quiet with gratitude, we are nothing; a single brush stroke down.  Why does spirit come into these muddy bodies?  The answer is contained inside.

The breathing of your speech is like the soul entering the body.  You feel the value of making meaningful sounds.  But poetry holds meaning lightly, like a rock in a sling.  We let it fly.  The rest is out of anyone's control.  A buried seed grain secretly becomes an ear of corn.  Bread dissolves in the stomach.  Candlewax turns to light.  A great joy breaks free of the self and joins the moving river of presence.  Read about prophetic states and let your soul grow restless in confinement."

Zeus, this is for you.  Not the Greek god, but a friend.  You know who you are.  I love you, dude.

Words are always a rock in a sling.  How I wish we could instead deliver our communication to each other directly from soul to soul.  Not thrown a vast distance unsure if it is to be caught or if it will inadvertently kill.  Rumi knew this.  His calling as a writer was always shadowed by the knowledge that words are imperfect.  Instead of trying to make perfection out of the imperfect, he named this shadow Shams and let her speak to fill the moment with the void where true communication lives.  

He knew we are but a single brush stroke down in a vast painting laid upon a canvas with the great beyond everywhere outside of our canvas.  "The great reed flute player," as he calls the creator, is just a starving artist in love with his craft as Rumi himself is.  Yet here he is with great music pouring from his heart-- a single brush stroke down in an impossibly complex piece of work hanging on the wall of an impossibly complex universe.  

Seeds turn to corn as miraculously as candle wax turns not light.  Rumi also believed that once we become free of this mortal coil, we will join the world beyond the painting.  We will no longer be a single stroke on a canvas or a single pot carrying water, we will see the painting as a whole or find our pot carrying water has spilled to become one with the whole ocean.

"We sit in this world with our money bags of energy wondering what will give the most return.  We get engrossed with knowledge, accomplishments, business ventures, purposes, and then we move on.  Where we are is melting snow.  You have bits of bird-doubt that will not let you roam free on the sky, but this is how sweet and free of fear I find myself now.  You need not look anymore now.  You have laid down inside me.  You are already helplessly mine.  I could lift you out of time, but not yet.  Stay in exile a little while longer.  Let the eventual joy of coming home increase."