Everybody who has spiritual awareness and at least some artistic sensitivity, loves the 13th century Persian scholar, mystic and poet, Rumi. His passionate, artful, never-ending search for the “Beloved” touches us deeply in three ways.
First, there is the captivating beauty of his imagery (in translation):
God’s joy moves from unmarked box to unmarked box,
from cell to cell. As rainwater, down into flowerbed.
As roses, up from the ground.
Now it looks like a plate of rice and fish,
now a cliff covered with vines,
now a horse being saddled.
It hides within these,
til one day it cracks them open.
The second way we connect with Rumi is his intense, unabashed emotional expression. The tortured, devastated, but ever so tender, patient, loving human heart is at the center of his passionate poetic work. Rumi’s whole world is in a highly emotive state: nature, romantic relationships, even every-day occurrences and things, and, above all, the poetic “I”.
If only secretly, we can relate to that very much. Even though most of us are not as openly expressive as he is, our inner experiences are very much driven by emotion, are they not?
The third and most important level of our connection with Rumi is spiritual. Not religious (few of us are Sufis), but looking at our lives as purposeful, evolving, and sacred. In a compelling way, Rumi lifts his (and with that, our) personal observations and experiences into the transpersonal realm.
The desire for the Beloved is not just the longing for a human companion, it is the search for God. The search for love is not just the need for a feel-good emotional state, it is the quest for divine love. A broken heart is not just an image for the grieving lover’s pain, it is an opening for finding heaven within.
Rumi gives us his all, and we love to receive it.
Carna
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