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No Flag
I used to want buyers for my words.
Now I wish someone would buy me away from words.
I have made a lot of charmingly profound images,
scenes with Abraham and Abraham’s father, Azar,
who was famous for making icons.
I am so tired of what I have been doing.
Then one image without form came,
and I quit.
Look for someone else to tend the shop.
I am out of the image-making business.
Finally I know the freedom
of madness.
A random image arrives. I scream,
Get out! It disintegrates.
Only love.
Only the holder the flag fits into.
No flag.
A Year With Rumi - Daily Readings
Coleman Barks
- Mood:
contemplative
October 19
Looking for the Center
The Friend comes into my body
looking for the center, unable
to find it, draws a blade,
strikes anywhere.
A Year With Rumi - Daily Readings
Coleman Barks
- Mood: contemplative
The Knots Untie (1)
Fire is whispering a secret in smoke’s ear,
This aloes wood loves me
because I help it live out its purpose.
With me it becomes fragrance,
and then disappears altogether.
The knows untie and open into absence,
as you do with me, my friend.
Eaten by flame, and smoked out into the sky.
This is most fortunate.
What’s unlucky is not to change and disappear.
This way leads through humiliation and contempt.
A Year With Rumi - Daily Readings
Coleman Barks
- Mood: contemplative
The Moments You Have Lived
As essence turns to ocean,
the particles glisten.
Watch how in this candle flame instant
blaze all the moments you have lived.
A Year With Rumi - Daily Readings
Coleman Barks
- Mood: contemplative
Medicine out of Pain
In this drumbeat moment of red flowers opening
and grapes being crushed,
the soul and luminous clarity sit together.
All desire wants is a taste of you,
two small villages in a mountain valley
where everyone longs for presence.
We start to step up.
A step appears.
You say, I am more compassionate
than your mother and father.
I make medicine out of your pain.
From your chimney smoke I shape new constellations.
I tell everything, but I do not say it,
because, my friend, it is better
your secret be spoken by you.
A Year With Rumi - Daily Readings
Coleman Barks
- Mood: contemplative
Autumn Rose Elegy
You have gone to the secret world.
Which way is it? You broke the cage and flew.
You heard the drum that calls you home.
You left this humiliating shelf, this disorienting
desert where we are given wrong directions.
What use now a crown?
You have become the sun.
No need for a belt.
You have slipped out of your waist.
I have heard that near the end
you were eyes looking at soul.
No looking now. You live inside the soul.
You are the strange autumn rose
that led the winter wind in by withering.
You are rain soaking everywhere
from cloud to ground.
No bother of talking. Flowing silence
and sweet sleep beside the Friend.
A Year With Rumi - Daily Readings
Coleman Barks
- Mood: contemplative
I’m Not Saying This Right
You bind me, and I tear away in a rage to open out
into air, a round brightness, a candlepoint,
all reason, all love.
This confusing joy, your doing,
this hangover, your tender thorn.
You turn to look, I turn.
I’m not saying this right.
I am a jailed crazy who ties up spirit-women.
I am Solomon.
What goes comes back. Come back.
We never left each other.
A disbeliever hides his disbelief,
but I will say his secret.
More and more awake, getting up at night,
spinning and falling with love for Shams.
A Year With Rumi - Daily Readings
Coleman Barks
- Mood: contemplative
What’s Not Here
I start out on this road,
call it love or emptiness.
I only know what’s not here.
Resentment seeds, back scratching greed,
worrying about outcome, fear of people.
When a bird gets free,
it does not go back for remnants
left on the bottom of the cage.
Close by, I’m rain. Far off,
a cloud of fire. I seem restless,
but I am deeply at ease.
Branches tremble. The roots are still.
I am a universe in a handful of dirt,
whole when totally demolished.
Talk about choices does not apply to me.
While intelligence considers options,
I am somewhere lost in the wind.
A Year With Rumi - Daily Readings
Coleman Barks
- Mood: contemplative
Your result for Howard Gardner's Eight Types of Intelligence Test...
Naturalistic
47% Logical, 29% Spatial, 6% Linguistic, 37% Intrapersonal, 16% Interpersonal, 35% Musical, 8% Bodily-Kinesthetic and 61% Naturalistic!
"This area has to do with nature, nurturing and relating information to one's natural surroundings. Those with it are said to have greater sensitivity to nature and their place within it, the ability to nurture and grow things, and greater ease in caring for, taming and interacting with animals. They may also be able to discern changes in weather or similar fluctuations in their natural surroundings. They are also good at recognizing and classifying different species.
'Naturalists' learn best when the subject involves collecting and analyzing, or is closely related to something prominent in nature; they also don't enjoy learning unfamiliar or seemingly useless subjects with little or no connections to nature. It is advised that naturalistic learners would learn more through being outside or in a kinesthetic way.
Careers which suit those with this intelligence include scientists, naturalists, conservationists, gardeners and farmers." (Wikipedia)
Take Howard Gardner's Eight Types of Intelligence Test at OkCupid
Sounds about right. I would like to see the actual answers compared to my answers though.
- Mood:
tired
Love and I Talking
Love says, You cannot deny me. Try.
I say, Yes, you appear out of nowhere
like the bubbles in wine, here and then not.
Love says, Prisoned in the body-jar,
singing at the banquet. I say,
this ecstasy is dangerous.
Love says, I sip the delicious day,
until night takes the cup away.
Then I insist night give it back.
The light I see by never changes.
The water of realization is the wine we mean,
where love is the liquid and your body the flagon.
Grace floods in. The wine’s power
breaks the jar. It is happening now.
The water of waking becomes the one who pours,
the wine itself, and every presence at the banquet.
No metaphor can hold this truth that knows how
to keep secret and when to show itself.
A Year With Rumi - Daily Readings
Coleman Barks
- Mood: contemplative
Condemn none: if you can stretch out a helping hand, do so. If you cannot, fold your hands, bless your brothers, and let them go their own way.
-Swami Vivekananda
If only we could all live this way the world would be a much better place.
- Mood: contemplative
In the Arc of Your Mallet
Don’t go anywhere without me.
Let nothing happen in the sky apart from me,
or on the ground, in this world or that world,
without my being in its happening.
Vision, see nothing I don’t see.
Language, say nothing.
The way the night knows itself with the moon
be that with me. Be the rose
nearest to the thorn that I am.
I want to feel myself in you when you taste food,
in the arc of your mallet when you work,
when you visit friends, when you go
up on the roof by yourself at night.
There is nothing worse than to walk out along the street
without you. I don’t know where I’m going.
You are the road and the knower of roads,
more than maps, more than love.
A Year With Rumi - Daily Readings
Coleman Barks
- Mood: contemplative
Your Eyes
I am so small I can barely be seen.
How can this great love be inside me?
Look at your eyes. They are so small,
but they see enormous things.
A Year With Rumi - Daily Readings
Coleman Barks
- Mood: contemplative
Walnuts
Philosophers have said that we love music
because it resembles the sphere-sounds of union.
We have been part of a harmony before,
so these moments of treble and bass
keep our remembering fresh.
Hearing the sound, we gather strength.
Love kindles with melody. Music feeds a lover
composure, and provides form for the imagination.
Music breathes on personal fire and makes it keener.
The waterhole is deep. A thirsty man climbs
a walnut tree growing next to the pool
and drops walnuts in one by one.
He listens carefully to the sound
as they hit and watches the bubbles.
A more rational man gives advice, You will regret
doing this. You are so for from the water
that by the time you get down to gather walnuts,
the water will have carried them away.
He replies, I am not here for walnuts.
I want the music they make when they hit.
A Year With Rumi - Daily Readings
Coleman Barks
- Mood: contemplative
Water from Your Spring
What was in that candle’s light
that opened and consumed me so quickly?
Come back, my friend. The form of our love
is not a created form.
Nothing can help me but that beauty.
There was a dawn I remember
when my soul heard something from your soul.
I drank water from your spring
and felt the current take me.
A Year With Rumi - Daily Readings
Coleman Barks
- Mood: contemplative
Goldsmithing
By Saladin’s shop suddenly
I hear the music of gold
being hammered, gold and God.
As gold thins out,
the presence becomes a sheer
gold leaf light
on this goldbeater’s face,
in his eyes as he works.
As the love-secret of Jacob
becomes Joseph’s smile,
as lovers leave what keeps them confined,
as Job’s patience dissolves to nothing,
you are the Friend
coming toward this touching.
You are the soul.
Be that, and when you hear yourself
in some hypocrisy,
cut free. Quickly, cut.
*This poem record the moment in Konya when Rumi heard an inner music in the goldbeater’s hammering coming from his friend Saladin’s hop. The legend is that he began spontaneously turning in the street in response to the music of existence.
A Year With Rumi - Daily Readings
Coleman Barks
- Mood: contemplative
Hoping to Be More Alive
You are an ocean in a drop of dew,
all the universes in a thin sack of blood.
What are these pleasures then,
these joys, these worlds
that you keep reaching for,
hoping they will make you more alive?
A Year With Rumi - Daily Readings
- Mood: contemplative
This Dove Here
Someone who does not run
toward the allure of love
walks a road where nothing lives.
But this dove here
senses the love-hawk floating above,
and waits, and will not be driven
or scared to safety.
A Year With Rumi - Daily Readings
Coleman Barks
- Mood: contemplative
You Are Crisp Autumn Morning Air |
 You love to feel alive and awake. For you, fall is somewhat of a rebirth. Even though autumn brings some death, it always makes you feel vibrant and excited. Something about cooler days, longer nights, and changing leaves deeply touches you. You feel motivated and driven in the fall. You feel like you can start over and be whoever you want to be. |
- Mood:
cheerful
Out Beyond
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn’t make any sense.
A Year With Rumi - Daily Readings
Coleman Barks
- Mood: contemplative
