Author: Karl Möller

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Stay bewildered inside God

Here’s a slightly longer excerpt from another Rumi poem, ‘The Basket of Fresh Bread’ (published in The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing). Some of Rumi’s poetry, which I discovered only recently, resonates very deeply with me and reinforces my journey into silence and contemplation.

Don’t look for it outside yourself.
You are the source of milk. Don’t milk others!

There is a fountain inside you.
Don’t walk around with an empty bucket.

You have a channel into the ocean,
yet you ask for water from a little pool.

…

There is a basket of fresh bread on your head,
yet you go door to door asking for crusts.

Knock on the inner door, no other.
Sloshing knee-deep in fresh riverwater,
yet you keep asking for other people’s waterbags.

Water is everywhere around you, but you see
only barriers that keep you from water.

…

Mad with thirst, you can’t drink from the stream
running close by your face. You are like a pearl
on the deep bottom wondering inside the shell,
Where’s the ocean?

…

Stay bewildered inside God,
and only that.

I love the imagery of nourishment and refreshment: water, milk and bread. Nothing spectacular, just staples, the stuff of everyday life, but essential. ‘Staying bewildered inside God’, that’s such an appropriate description of where I have been finding myself for some time now.

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Rumi on love

Look inside and find where a person
loves from. That’s the reality,
not what they say.

… and remember, the way
you make love is the way God will be with you.

If you want
to be more alive, love
is the truest health.

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

Rumi, The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing

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Like mountain water

Speaking of poetry, here are some further thoughts, this time from Rumi, the Sufi master:

… Poetry, the dear

words and images of song, comes down
over me like mountain water

(Rumi, The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing)

Refreshing, live-giving mountain water, some poetry is indeed like that.

I also read recently that you come away from reading poetry, feeling that you have been cleansed – yet another image that I can relate to.

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A pointer to pure being

Having enjoyed poetry when I went to school, I somehow never followed this up, until fairly recently, inspired by a friend, I took to reading it on a regular basis. Now there is always some poetry on my book pile, and I would not want to be without it anymore. So what difference has it made?

It does, of course, depend on the poet I’m reading, but poetry lifts my spirit, it frees me and opens me up, it provides me with consolation and keeps my desire aflame. And it gives me a voice where, in the past, my pain and grief had been mute.

Most importantly perhaps, poetry, as Coleman Barks notes (in Rumi, Bridge to the Soul: Journeys Into the Music and Silence of the Heart), points me to pure being and persuades me there. What better place to be?

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There is no choice then

Love is patient;
love is kind;
love is not envious
or boastful
or arrogant
or rude.

It does not insist on its own way;
it is not irritable or resentful;
it does not rejoice in wrongdoing,
but rejoices in the truth.

It bears all things,
believes all things,
hopes all things,
endures all things.

Love never ends.

These words from Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians (13:4-8) have to be among the most challenging but also the wisest and truest comments ever made about love, true love, that is, love that fully deserves that name.

In ‘Decreation: How Women Like Sappho, Marguerite Porete and Simone Weil Tell God’, an essay I have referred to before, Anne Carson offers her own reflections on love, self and God in connection with the mysticism of Sappho, Marguerite Porete and Simone Weil. She notes, rightly, I think, that almost everything that passes as love is little more than self-love.

True love is characterised by patience and kindness. It cares for the Other, whoever that Other may be (love does not discriminate between who is, and isn’t, lovable), and does not insist on its own way. It bears, believes, hopes and endures everything; and it never ends. Now that is a challenge!

Yet, says Paul, I can have all knowledge and understanding, all faith even, but if I ‘do not have love, I am nothing’. There is no choice then, is there? It also is the most worthy of goals.

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We shall not call you human

Human beings come
from the same source.
We are one family.

If a part of the body hurts,
all parts contract with pain.

If you are not concerned
with another’s suffering,
we shall not call you human.

Saadi, as quoted by Coleman Barks in Rumi, Bridge to the Soul: Journeys Into the Music and Silence of the Heart