Topic: Saints and Mystics

[Nichi]

What Hurts the Soul?

We tremble, thinking we're about to dissolve
into non-existence, but non-existence fears
even more that it might be given human form!

Loving God is the only pleasure.
Other delights turn bitter.

What hurts the soul?
To live without tasting
the water of its own essence.

People focus on death and this material earth.
They have doubts about soul-water.
Those doubts can be reduced!

Use night to wake your clarity.
Darkness and the living water are lovers.
Let them stay up together.

When merchants eat their big meals and sleep
their dead sleep, we night-thieves go to work.

-- Mathnawi I: 3684-3692
Version by Coleman Barks
"Say I Am You"

[Nichi]

The minute I heard my first love story
I started looking for you, not knowing
how blind that was.

Lovers don't finally meet somewhere.
They're in each other all along.

 
   
Coleman Barks
Open Secret: Versions of Rumi

[Nichi]

A Thief in The Night

Suddenly
    (yet somehow expected)
he arrived, the guest....
    the heart trembling "Who's there?"

and soul responding
    "The Moon..."
came into the house, and we lunatics
    ran into the street, stared up
looking
    for the moon.

Then--inside the house--
    he cried out "Here I am !"
and we, beyond earshot
    running around, calling him...

crying for him
    for the drunken nightingale
locked lamenting
    in our garden
while we mourning ringdoves
    murmured "Where Where?"

As if at midnight
    the sleepers bolt upright
in their beds
    hearing a thief
break into the house
    they stumble about
crying "Help!
                    A thief! A thief!"

but the burglar himself
    mingles in the confusion
echoing their cries:
    "..... a thief!"
till one cry
    melts with the others.

Rumi
Ghazal (Ode) 2172
"The Drunken Universe"
Translation by Peter Lamborn Wilson
with Nasrullah Pourjavadi

[Nichi]

Don't worry about saving these songs!
And if one of our instruments breaks,
it doesn't matter.

We have fallen into the place
where everything is music.

The strumming and the flute notes
rise into the atmosphere,
and even if the whole world's harp
should burn up, there will still be
hidden instruments playing.

So the candle flickers and goes out.
We have a piece of flint, and a spark.

This singing-art is sea foam.
The graceful movements come from a pearl
somewhere on the ocean floor.

Poems reach up like the edge of driftwood
along the beach, wanting and wanting!

They derive
from a slow and powerful root
that we can't see.

Stop the words now.
Open the window in the center of your chest,
and let the spirits fly in and out.

Rumi -- Version by Coleman Barks
(from a translation by John Moyne)
"Like This"
Maypop, 1990

[Nichi]

As Lakewater Rises in Mist

The singer sings about love, until
the Friend appears in the doorway.

Kitchen smoke drifts up into clouds
and becomes a thousand-year- old wine.

I am here, not reckoning the credit
accumulated or future speculation.

I am the vineyard and the barrel
where the grapes are crushed, the

entire operation, whose transaction
pours this glass of wine, this moment,

this poem. A man stumbles by with
baggage, papers from the house, regret

and wishing, not knowing which to
tend to. Neither. After you see

the face, concerns change, as
lakewater rises into mist.


-- Ghazal (Ode) 2394
Version by Coleman Barks, with Nevit Ergin
"The Glance"

[Nichi]

Hours make the young old.
All changes have arisen from the hours:
the one who is freed from hours is freed from change.
When for an hour you escape from the hours,
"how" no longer remains:
you become familiar with that which is without "how."
Hours are not acquainted with timelessness.
For the one who is possessed by time,
there is no way there except bewilderment.


-- Mathnawi III:2073-2076
Version by Camille and Kabir Helminski
"Rumi: Jewels of Remembrance"

[Michael]

The minute I heard my first love story
I started looking for you, not knowing
how blind that was.

Lovers don't finally meet somewhere.
They're in each other all along.

 
   
Coleman Barks
Open Secret: Versions of Rumi

 

[Nichi]

Isn't it the truth?

[Nichi]

Love has nothing to do with the five senses and the six directions:
its goal is only to experience the attraction exerted by the Beloved.
Afterwards, perhaps, permission will come from God:
the secrets that ought to be told will be told
with an eloquence nearer to the understanding
than these subtle confusing allusions.
The secret is partner with none but the knower of the secret:
in the skeptic's ear the secret is no secret at all.



-- Mathnawi VI:5-8
Version by Camille and Kabir Helminski
"Rumi: Jewels of Remembrance"

[Nichi]

Choose A Suffering

Yesterday in the assembly I saw my
soul inside the jar of the one who

pours. "Don't forget your job," I
said. He came with his lighted

face, kissed the full glass, and as
he handed it to me, it became a

red-gold oven taking me in, a ruby
mine, a greening garden. Everyone

chooses a suffering that will change
him or her to a well-baked loaf.

Abu Lahab*, biting his hand, chose
doubt. Abu Huraya*, his love for

cats! One searches a confused mind
for evidence. The other has a

leather sack full of what he needs.
If we could be silent now, the

master would tell us some stories
they hear in the high council.


-- Ghazal (Ode) 1246
Version by Coleman Barks
"The Soul of Rumi"


*Don't know these references.

[Nichi]

A wealth you cannot imagine
flows through you.

Do not consider what strangers say.
Be secluded in your secret heart-house,
that bowl of silence.

Talking, no matter how humble-seeming,
is really a kind of bragging.

Let silence be the art
you practice.

—Rumi, translation by Coleman Barks from Rumi: "Bridge to the Soul."

[Nichi]

"An Invisible Bee"

Look how desire has changed in you,
how light and colorless it is,

with the world growing new marvels
because of your changing. Your soul

has become an invisible bee. We
don't see it working, but there's

the full honeycomb.! Your body's height,
six feet or so, but your soul rises

through nine levels of sky. A barrel
corked with earth and a raw wooden

spike keeps the oldest vineyard's wine
inside. When I see you, it is not so

much your physical form, but the company
of two riders, your pure-fire devotion

and your love for the one who teaches you;
then the sun and moon on foot behind those.

-- Ghazal (Ode) 2390
Version by Coleman Barks, with Nevit Ergin
"The Glance"
Viking-Penguin, 1999

[Nichi]

Clear Wine

A mystic is one
who passes away --

He abides in the essence
of that which is Real.

Such a person is pure,
clear wine without dregs.

Now whole, he displays
the Most Beautiful Names.


Binavi Badakhshani
13th Century Afghanistan

Love's Alchemy: Poems from the Sufi Tradition,
Translated by David Fideler and Sabrineh Fideler

[Nichi]

In this state there is no Shiva,
nor any holy union.

Only a somewhat something moving
dreamlike on a fading road.

- Lalla -

[Nichi]

One who knows and knows that he knows... His horse of wisdom will reach the skies.
One who knows, but doesn't know that he knows... He is fast asleep, so you should wake him up!
One who doesn't know, but knows that he doesn't know... His limping mule will eventually get him home.
One who doesn't know and doesn't know that he doesn't know... He will be eternally lost in his hopeless oblivion!

--Ibn Yamin, thirteenth-century