Rumi

Emma and I are working on things, but she’s moved out of the nightstand. She’s admitted she has feelings for Frank Churchill and I’ve seen how she looks at Mr. Knightley. She says it's all for Henry's sake, but I have my doubts. There was even talk of us ending it altogether, but we’ve decided to slow things down until we know where our relationship is headed. We’re still seeing each other a couple times a week for lunch or drinks after work, but I haven’t told her I’m reading another book. 

It’s a book of poetry originally written in Persia during the thirteenth century, by Rumi, poet, sage, student, Sufi, whirling dervish. The collection I’m reading now and read often when I feel myself swimming too hard in the wrong direction, or too hard in what I think is the right direction for that matter, is “The Essential Rumi”, translated by Coleman Barks.  Do people even read poetry any more? Should I have admitted I do?

Reading Rumi is reading about love, the vast deep what-we’re-made-of  kind. It’s about letting go and occasionally it's about laughing at our egos, our smallest self. The titles alone make me smile: Love Dogs, Chickpea to Cook, Dissolver of Sugar, Unfold Your Own Myth, Where Everything is Music These are, for the most part, beautiful poems, but there are pieces in this collection that are better passed over if you're squeamish. 

The allegories Rumi uses are sometimes very crude. He talks about the pitfalls of unbridled physical attachments to things, including bodies very graphically and is occasionally coarse in an effort to make his point strongly. An example of this is The Dervish at the Door, who takes it upon himself to turn a selfish, hoarding man’s home into a temporary privy. It makes perfect sense to the dervish to “fertilize” since nothing vital or living or bounteous is  happening in the place, otherwise, why would the man have denied him dry bread, gristle or water. I cringe occasionally, but read on, knowing anything that has lasted almost eight hundred years must have merit. I also read on because the majority of the works are like this untitled piece:


"The way of love is not
a subtle argument, 

The door there
is devastation. 

Birds make great sky-circles
of their freedom. 

How do they learn it?
They fall, and falling,
they’re given wings."