...for I know myself not,
Neither a Christian am I, nor a Yahoodi, nor a Magian, nor a Muslim.

Neither of the East am I nor West, nor of the land, nor sea;
Nor of nature's quarry, nor of heavens circling above.

I am not made of earth or water, not of wind or fire;
Nor am I of the Divine Throne nor of floor carpeting,
Nor of the realm of the cosmos, nor of minerals.

I am not from India, or China, or Bulgaria, or Turkistan;
I am not from the kingdom of the two Iraqs, or from the land
of Khorasan.

Neither of this world am I nor the next; nor of heaven nor hell;
Nor from Adam nor Eve nor of Eden, nor paradise or its porter.

My home is the homeless, my whereabouts the whereaboutsless;
Not either body nor soul for I am myself the Beloved.
Rumi

Rumi was born today 800 years ago. He was not a poet or a philosopher. He was rather a main stream theologian scholar, born in Balkh (north Afghanistan) and traveled extensively. With Mongolian excursion, he runs away westward and eventually settles in Konya (south central Turkey).

One day he runs into a weird wandering dervish by the name Shams of Tabriz (capital of east Azerbaijan northwest Iran). After some conversations, Shams grabs Rumi’s books and throws them into a nearby well and tells him, here liberate yourself. Rumi near heart attack lashes out at Shams that he just ruined him by destroying all his intellectual credentials. Firmly and calmly, Shams replies, the knowledge that can be taken away from you that easily is good for nothing.

From that point on the two become inseparable. Rumi seems to have discovered a new world and starts going through some fundamental changes. The two disappeared times for weeks of meditation and ‘conversation’.

One day Shams disappears for good. Rumi feels like a cat with his whiskers cut. Mentally paralyzed, aimlessly shuttles back and forth between home and institute, where he used to teach theology. Now he is uninterested in his job and all day grabs a column and turns around it and murmurs unintelligibly. His students listening to him carefully realize what he was saying were not babbling but rhythmic and quite beautiful. They decide to write them down.

800 years later, those writings are the most read poetry in America. He talks about a love that every one can feel it but not quite understand it. A kind of love that is deeply ingrained in human nature but gets tainted when it comes out and you try to interweave it with material world and the qualified and compartmentalized human relations. Compartmentalized by gender, class, ego, control, …

Listen to the reed how it agonizes
How it laments the pain of separation.

He analogizes human to the reed flute, plucked out of its nurturing bed, drilled nine times (like humans) and made to sound (talk). And it sounds like wanting to reunite with its creator. He argues that we humans talk because we are searching. We are searching for reunification with the ‘beloved’. ‘Beloved’ is often interpreted as ‘God’. In sufi traditions, individuals like Rumi are called “Luminaries”, but we call them ‘mystic’, because ‘we’ don’t understand what they are saying. The only thing mystic about Rumi is the translations. Admittedly, the only people who know what these words meant 800 years ago are other Luminaries, who are not easily accessible by foreign scholars.

Truly I am a wondrous thing
For him who sees me:
Lover and Beloved, both am I,
There is no second.
O seeker of the essential Truth,
Thine eye's film hides it.
Return unto thyself, take note:
None is but thee.
All good, all knowledge springs from thee;
In thee's the Secret.

Rumi is a ring of a spiritual tradition that advocates “include and transcend”, in sharp contrast to “exclude and trample”.

At the time of night prayer as the sun slides down,
the route the senses walk on closes, and the route to the invisible opens.

The angel of sleep then gathers and drives along the spirits,
just as the mountain keeper gathers his sheep on the slope.

And what amazing sights he offers to the descending sheep.
Cities with sparkling streets, hyacinth gardens, emerald pastures.

The spirit sees astounding beings, turtles turned to men,
men turned to angels, when sleep erases the banal.

I think one could say the spirit goes back to its old home;
it no longer remembers where it lives, it loses its fatigue.

It carries around in life so many griefs and loads
and trembles under their weight. But in sleep they are all gone. All is well.

We live at a time that the fundamentals of beauty and genuine compassion and love are being subliminally and surreptitiously challenged and targeted. As a built-in self-preservation act, humans build a protective cocoon around themselves and try to keep their humanity intact. Could reading Rumi at this scale be an indication of a quiet rebellion against degradation and denigration of our needs for soothing words and images?

Out beyond all ideas,
Of right doing,
And wrong doing,
There is a field.
I’ll meet you there.

Molana Jallal eddin e Balkhi ye Rumi
The mighty, zenith of our belief, of Balkh, of Rum.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!
===============
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