Rumi

Blog – write a response to 3 of rumi’s poems

The drum of the realization of the promise is beating,
we are sweeping the road to the sky. Your joy is here today, what remains for tomorrow?
The armies of the day have chased the army of the night,
Heaven and earth are filled with purity and light.
Oh! joy for he who has escaped from this world of perfumes and color!
For beyond these colors and these perfumes, these are other colors in the heart and the soul.
Oh! joy for this soul and this heart who have escaped
the earth of water and clay,
Although this water and this clay contain the hearth of the
philosophical stone.

(Mystic Odes 473)

This poem gives us an idea of Rumi’s opinion of the physical world. The “world of perfumes and color,” of “water and clay.” It’s difficult to understand exactly what Rumi is saying here. In one sense, it seems that he’s promoting living for the day and living your physical life to its fullest. Then, in the same breath, he expresses joy for those who have escaped this world. That seems confusing to me.

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.
It makes absolutely no difference
what people think of you.
Rumi, 'We Are Three', Mathnawi VI, 831-845

I like this poem, especially its last two lines. “It makes absolutely no difference what people think of you.” This is something I had to learn early in life, because I was picked on quite a bit. I learned that those who act that way, those who judge you, are not worth your time. It’s people who accept you for who you are that you want to be friends with.

A Star Without a Name

When a baby is taken from the wet nurse,
it easily forgets her
and starts eating solid food.

Seeds feed awhile on ground,
then lift up into the sun.

So you should taste the filtered light
and work your way toward wisdom
with no personal covering.

That's how you came here, like a star
without a name. Move across the night sky
with those anonymous lights.

(Mathnawi III, 1284-1288)

I like the metaphor Rumi uses here. We as humans must grow past the infantile stage of our current view of the world and move onto spiritual adulthood. We must grasp our true place in the universe and its meaning without the filters we normally see through.