You, too, can submit your favorite Rumi poem and be entered in a contest to win a sacred journey to Turkey with Shiva Rea, where you can participate in the Wake-up Online Rumi Festival, December 14-21, 2007, celebrating 800 years of Rumi’s life.
Here are some of the poems selected by those who have already entered the contest:
I am part of the load!
Words are the nest
Breath the bird
Body is the riverbed
and spirit the rolling water.
Out beyond the
idea of
wrong doing
and
right doing
there is a field
I’ll meet you there.
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
The sun is love. The lover, a speck circling the sun.
A Spring wind moves to dance any branch that isn’t dead.
Any branch that isn’t dead, any heart ready to move with the ecstasy of love, will dance without being able to help it, even in its most painful moments.
Since we live where everything is music, everything is dancing.
Watch the dust grains moving in the light near the window.
Their dance is our dance.
We rarely hear the inward music, but we’re all dancing to it nevertheless,
directed by the one who teaches us, the pure joy of the sun, our music master.
Whatever you love, you are.
Observe the wonders as they occur around you. Don’t claim them. Feel the artistry moving through, and be silent.
INSIDE THE ROSE
That camel there with its calf running
behind it, Sutur and Koshek, we’re like
them: mothered and nursed by where and
who we are from, following our fates
where they lead, until we hear a drum
begin, grace entering our lives, a prayer
of gratitude. We feel the call of God
and the journey changes. A dry field
of stones turns soft and moist as cheese.
The mountain feels level under us. Love
becomes agile and quick, and suddenly
we’re there! This traveling’s not done
with the body. God’s secret takes form
in your loving. But there are those in
bodies who are pure soul. It can happen.
These messengers invite us to walk with
them. They say, “You may feel happy
enough where you are, but we can’t do
without you any longer! Please.” So
we walk along inside the rose, being
pulled like the creeks and rivers are,
out from the town onto the plain. My
guide, my soul, your only sadness is when
I am not walking with you. In deep silence,
with some exertion to stay in your company,
I could save you a lot of trouble!
BREATHING
There is a way
of breathing
That’s a shame and a suffocation
And there’s another way of expiring,
A love breath,
That lets you open infinitely.
There is a life-force within your soul, seek that life.
There is a gem in the mountain of your body, seek that mine.
O traveler, if you are in search of That
Don’t look outside, look inside yourself and seek That.
You personify God’s message.
You reflect the King’s face.
There is nothing in the universe that you are not
Everything you want, look for it within yourself—you are that.
This aloneness is worth more than a thousand lives.
This freedom is worth more than all the lands on earth.
To be one with the truth for just a moment,
Is worth more than the world and life itself.
Make yourself free from self at one stroke!
Like a sword be without trace of soft iron;
Like a steel mirror, scour off all rust with contrition.
Love is the alchemy of the east, like the clouds it is pregnant with a thousand bolts of lighting, deep within me moves the ocean of his splendor and all creation springs from it.
Through Love all that is bitter will sweet
Through Love all that is copper will be gold.
Through Love all dregs will turn to purest wine
Through Love all pain will turn to medicine.
Through Love the dead will all become alive.
Through Love the king will turn into a slave!
God has given us a dark wine so potent that, drinking it, we leave the two worlds.
God has put into the form of hashish a power to deliver the taster from self-consciousness.
God has made sleep so that it erases every thought.
God made Majnun love Layla so much thatjust her dog would cause confusion in him.
There are thousands of wines that can take over our minds.
Don’t think all ecstacies are the same!
Jesus was lost in his love for God. His donkey was drunk with barley.
Drink from the presence of saints, not from those other jars.
Every object, every being, is a jar full of delight.
Be a conoisseur, and taste with caution.
Any wine will get you high. Judge like a king, and choose the purest,
the ones unadulterated with fear, or some urgency about “what’s needed.”
Drink the wine that moves you as a camel moves when it’s been untied,
and is just ambling about.
The drum of the realization of the promise is beating,
we are sweeping the road to the sky. Your joy is here today, what remains for tomorrow?
The armies of the day have chased the army of the night,
Heaven and earth are filled with purity and light.
Oh! joy for he who has escaped from this world of perfumes and color!
For beyond these colors and these perfumes, these are other colors in the heart and the soul.
Oh! joy for this soul and this heart who have escaped
the earth of water and clay,
Although this water and this clay contain the hearth of the
philosophical stone.
Come to the orchard in spring.
There is light and wine, and sweethearts
in the pomegranate flowers.
If you do not come, these do not matter.
If you do come, these do not matter.
SOME KISS WE WANT
There is some kiss we want
With our whole lives, the touch
of spirit on the body. Seawater
begs the pearl to break its shell.
And the lily, how passionately
it needs some wild darling !
At night, I open the window and ask
The moon to come and press its
face against mine.
Breathe into me. Close the language door
and open the love-window.
The moon won’t use the door,
only the window.
SPRING GIDDINESS
Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep.
I would love to kiss you.
The price of kissing is your life.
Now my loving is running toward my life shouting,
What a bargain, let’s buy it.
Daylight, full of small dancing particles
and the one great turning, our souls
are dancing with you, without feet, they dance.
Can you see them when I whisper in your ear?
All day and night, music,
a quiet, bright
reedsong. If it
fades, we fade.
THE UNSEEN POWER
We are the flute, our music is all Thine;
We are the mountains echoing only Thee;
And movest to defeat or victory;
Lions emblazoned high on flags unfurled-
They wind invisible sweeps us through the world.
THE GUEST HOUSE
The human being is a guest house
Every morning there is a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness
Some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor
Welcome and entertain them all
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows, who violently sweep your house
and empty it from its furniture
still, treat each guest honourably.
He may be clearing you out for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.
Oh my heart,
Don’t become discouraged
so easily.
Have faith.
In the hidden world,
there are many mysteries,
many wonders.
Even if the whole planet
threatens your life,
don’t let go of the Beloved’s robe
for even a breath.
For years, copying other people, I tried to know myself.
From within, I couldn’t decide what to do.
Unable to see, I heard my name being called.
Then I walked outside.
The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep.
BUOYANCY
Love has taken away my practices
and filled me with poetry.
I tried to keep quietly repeating,
No strength but yours,
but I couldn’t.
I had to clap and sing.
I used to be respectable and chaste and stable,
but who can stand in this strong wind
and remember these things?
A mountain keeps an echo deep inside itself.
That’s how I hold your voice.
I am a scrap wood thrown in your fire,
and quickly reduced to smoke.
I saw you and became empty.
This emptiness, more beautiful than existence,
It obliterates existence, and yet when it comes,
existence thrives and creates more existence!
The sky is blue. The world is a blind
man squatting on the road.
But whoever sees your emptiness
sees beyond blue and beyond the blind man.
A great soul hides like Mohammad or Jesus,
moving through a crowd in a city
where no one knows him.
To praise is to praise how one surrenders to the emptiness.
To praise the sun is to praise your own eyes.
Praise, the ocean. What we say, a little ship.
So the sea-journey goes on, and who knows where!
Just to be held by the ocean is the
best luck we could have.
It’s a total waking up!
Why should we grieve that we’ve been sleeping?
It doesn’t matter how long we’ve been unconscious.
We’re groggy, but let the guilt go.
Feel the motions of tenderness
around you, the buoyancy.
PUT THIS DESIGN IN YOUR CARPET
Spiritual experience is a modest woman
who looks lovingly at only one man.
It’s a great river where ducks
live happily, and crows drown.
The visible bowl of form contains food
that is both nourishing and a source of heartburn.
There is an unseen presence we honor
that gives the gifts.
You’re water. We’re the millstone.
You’re wind. We’re the dust blown up into shapes.
You’re spirit. We’re the opening and closing of our hands.
You’re the clarity.
We’re this language that tries to say it.
You’re joy. We’re all the different kinds of laughing.
Any movement or sound is a profession of faith,
as the millstone grinding is explaining how it believes
in the river! No metphor can say this,
but I can’t stop pointing to the beauty.
Every moment and place says,
“Put this design in your carpet!”
Like the shepard in Book II,
who wanted to pick the lice off God’s robe,
and stitch up God’s shoes, I want to be
in such a passionate adoration
that my tent gets pitched against the sky!
Let the beloved come and sit like a guard dog
in front of the tent.
When the ocean surges,
don’t let me just hear it.
Let it splash inside my chest!
Soul receives from soul that knowledge, therefore not by book nor from tongue.
If knowledge of mysteries come after emptiness of mind, that is illumination of heart.
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.
WE THREE
My love wanders the rooms, melodious,
flute notes, plucked wires,
full of a wine the Magi drank
on the way to Bethlehem.
We are three. The moon comes
from its quiet corner, puts a pitcher of water
down in the center. The circle
of surface flames.
One of us kneels to kiss the threshold.
One drinks, with wine-flames playing over his face.
One watches the gathering,
and says to any cold onlookers,
This dance is the joy of existence.