The Soul of Rumi

by Jalal Al-Din Rumi, Maulana; Moyne, John; Ergin, Nevit; Arberry, A. J.; Barks, Coleman; Barks, Coleman

• ISBN13: 9780060604530
• ISBN10: 0060604530
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-08-30
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publications

Summary

Collects newly translated and annotated poems by the thirteenth-century Sufi mystic covering topics including silence, God, play, friendship, grief, and music.

Author Biography

Coleman Barks is a renowned poet who taught English and creative writing at the University of Georgia for many years

Table of Contents

Preface	xv
Introduction	3	(12)
Rumi's Life and Times
Some Claims About Poetry and Consciousness
Fana and Baqa
The Question of the Personal
A Note About This Book
A Green Shawl: Solomon's Far Mosque	15	(4)
Entrance Door
What Was Told, That
Mary's Hiding
I want to be where ...
Would you like to have revealed to you ...
Imagining is like feeling around ...
The Husk and Core of Masculinity
Initiation: The Necessary Pain of Changing	19	(9)
Work in the Invisible
A Necessary Autumn Inside Each
Pain
A Surprise of Roses
More Range
Choose a Suffering
Climb to the Execution Place
Watch a One-Year-Old
Baqa: Inside This Ordinary Daylight	28	(9)
Walkingstick Dragon
The Opener
Soul Light and Sun the Same
The Pattern Improves
You're from a country beyond this universe ...
Essence is emptiness ...
We're not afraid of God's blade ...
Come to this street with ...
Spring overall. But inside us ...
This is how I would die ...
How will you know the difficulties ...
Love is the way messengers ...
Begin
Back to Being
Three Travelers Tell Their Dreams
This Speech: The Source of Dream Vision	37	(9)
Looking into the Creek
Forth
Hometown Streets
A Trace
Creator of Absence and Presence
A Ship Gliding over Nothing
Omar and the Old Poet
One Altar: The Inner Meaning of Religions	46	(15)
One Song
The Indian Tree
Your Face
Let the Way Itself Arrive
A Cross-Eyed Student
Dear Soul
Four Words for What We Want
Four Interrupted Prayers
Spiritual Windowshoppers
The clear bead at the center ...
A Small Dog Trying to Get You to Play: The Lighthearted Path	61
Pictures of the Soul
Soul and the Old Woman
The Core
Duck Wisdom
Pebble Zikr
Feet Becoming Head
Thirst: Water's Voice	54	(10)
What We Hear in a Friend's Voice
Talking and God's Love of Variety
Amazed Mouth
No longer a stranger, you listen ...
The King's Falcon on a Kitchen Shelf: How It Feels to Live Apart from Majesty	64	(8)
The City of Saba
The Thief
The King's Falcon
The Ground's Generosity
Sick of Scripture
Medicine
Witness: Stay at the Flame's Core	72	(7)
The Creek and the Stars
Night Thieves
Inshallah
Thinking and the Heart's Mystical Way
Paradox
Empty Boat
Whereabouts Unknown
The Level of Words
To the Extent They Can Die
Soul Joy: You Feel a River Moving in You	79	(6)
Moving Water
Uncle of the Jar
When Words Are Tinged with Lying
Joy moves always to new locations ...
The Source of Joy
A road might end at a single house ...
Rise. Move around the center ...
A Story They Know
Roses Underfoot
I open and fill with love and ...
Any cup I hold fills with wine ...
Turning the Refuse of Damascus: Work with the One Who Keeps Time	85	(9)
Mashallah
Cleansing Conflict
Shadow and Light Source Both
Wealth Without Working
Love for Certain Work
The Hoopoe's Talent
When school and mosque and minaret ...
Not until a person dissolves, can ...
While you are still yourself ...
Grief Song, Praise Song: Peacefulness with Death	94	(7)
On the Day I Die
One who does what the Friend wants done ...
Childhood, youth, and maturity ...
The angel of death arrives ...
When you come back inside my chest ...
Last night things flowed between us ...
I placed one foot on the wide plain ...
Longing is the core of mystery ...
Time to Sacrifice Taurus
The Sheikh Who Lost Two Sons
What's Inside the Ground
A Brightening Floor
The Death of Saladin
At the Outermost Extension of Empire: Diving into Qualities	101	(4)
Qualities
Wooden Cages
Prayer Is an Egg
Mutakallim: Speaking with a Group	105	(5)
Evidence
Two Donkeys
The Indian Parrot
Living as Evidence: The Way from Wanting to Longing	110	(4)
I Pass by the Door
Border Stations
Wind That Mixes in Your Fire
The Different Moon Shapes
Husam
Garnet Red: In the Madhouse Gnawing on Chains	114	(8)
Evening Sky Garnet Red
The Sweet Blade of Your Anger
Fourteen Questions
Asylum
What's the lover to do ...
Someone who does not run ...
This mud body ...
There's no light like yours, no breeze ...
The Silent Articulation of a Face
A Small Green Island
Your eyes, when they really see ...
Both Wings Broken
Extravagance: Exuberance That Informs and Streams Beyond	122	(3)
There You Are
Come Horseback
Wilder Than We Ever
Night: Darkness, Living Water	125	(3)
Last night, the Friend ...
Flowers open every night ...
You that prefer, as crows do ...
Don't sleep now. Let the turning ...
What Hurts the Soul?
Midnight, but your forehead ...
Some Kiss We Want
Dawn: Spring Morning Listening	128	(5)
The Generations I Praise
Hunt Music
Knowledge Beyond Love
Soul, Heart, and Body One Morning
Drawn by Soup
She Is the Creator
The Banquet: This Is Enough Was Always True	133	(4)
This Is Enough
The Music We Are
Joseph
YHU
The Moment
Poetry: The Song of Being Empty	137	(7)
Cup
Glory to Mutabilis
All We Sell
Poetry and Cooking Tripe
Is This a Place Where Stories Are Acted Out?
A Song of Being Empty
A Salve Made with Dirt
What I Say Makes Me Drunk
Pilgrim Notes: Chance Meetings, Dignity, and Purpose	144	(7)
Not Here
Cry Out Your Grief
Broom Work
A Clean Sandy Spot
Two Sacks
Any Chance Meeting
The One Thing You Must Do
Apple Orchards in Mist: Being in Between Language and the Soul's Truth	151	(5)
You Are Not Your Eyes
Prayer to Be Changed
A Small Market Between Towns
Lovers in Law School
Cup and Ocean
The Joke of Materialism: Turning Bread into Dung	156	(8)
Mounted Man
This Disaster
Sneezing Out Animals
Not Intrigued with Evening
How Attraction Happens
Book Beauty
Under the Hill
Fana: Dissolving Beyond Doubt and Certainty	164	(10)
In the Waves and Underneath
Infidel Fish
A Star with No Name
Rush Naked
Die Before You Die
Refuge
Love with No Object
The Road Home
Come Out and Give Something
Two Human-Sized Wedding Candles
Blessing the Marriage
One Swaying Being
Human Grief: We Are Sent to Eat the World	174	(6)
I've broken through to longing ...
The center leads to love ...
This Battered Saucepan
A Delicate Girl
The Threat of Death
Twenty Small Graves
I saw grief drinking a cup of sorrow ...
Sour, Doughy, Numb, and Raw
I could not have known ...
Inner Sun: No More the Presence	180	(5)
The Breast My Heart Nurses
No More the Presence
Out in the Open Air
The Eye of the Heart
A Deep Nobility
Sacrifice: Remember Leaving Egypt	185	(3)
Remember Egypt
Astrological Bickerings
Extract the Thorn
When Friends Meet: The Most Alive Moment	188	(7)
The Most Alive Moment
The Soul's Friend
Inside Shams's Universe
Like Light over This Plain
Wake and Walk Out
Form Is Ecstatic
The Reedbed of Silence: Opening to Absence	195	(4)
Back into the Reedbed!
A Vague Trace
The Taste
I hear nothing in my ear ...
The Uses of Community: The Plural You	199	(7)
Love Dervishes
The Communal Heart
Bowls of Food
Blade
Eye of Water: Clairvoyance, Being Several Places at Once, and the Rainpaths of Inspiration	206	(6)
Cooked Heads
Float, Trust, Enjoy
Light Breeze
Sitting Together
Seeing with the Eye of Water We Float On
Solomon's Sight
Music: Patience and Improvisation	212	(4)
We No Longer See the One Who Teaches Us
Music Loosens Deafness
Jami's The Camel Driver's Song
Gratitude for Teachers: The Lesson of Dogs	216	(9)
The Three Stooges
Listen to the Dogs
The Bow to Adam
To Trust the Ocean
Strange Gathering
Auction
Scatterbrain Sweetness
Every Section of Road
A Cap to Wear in Both Worlds
Forgiveness: As a Christian Disappears into Grace	225	(7)
The Spring
The Way That Moves as You Move
We Prescribe a Friend
What You've Been Given
Now I lay me down to stay ...
Grace Got Confused
Soul Art: The Hungry Animal and the Connoisseur	232	(5)
One Human Gesture
The Mangy Calf
Beggars
If You Want to Live Your Soul
More Pilgrim Notes: Habits That Blind the Psyche	237	(6)
Habits That Blind the Psyche
Dolls That Pull the Stuffing Out of Each Other
Being Slow to Blame
Cuisine and Sex
The soul fell into the soup ...
Be clear and smiling for those who ...
No Discussion
One Who Can Quit Seeing Himself
The Mystery of Renunciation: A Way of Leaving the World That Nourishes the World	243	(6)
A Way of Leaving the World
One-Handed Basket Weaving
Not a Food Sack, A Reed Flute
The Flower's Eye
Sheikh Sarrazi Comes in from the Wilderness
I Throw It All Away
Warrior Light: How One Embodies the Collective	249	(4)
Warrior Light
Inside Solitude
The Bear's True Dance
Choosing and Total Submission: Both Are True	253	(4)
Choosing and Total Submission
These Decisions
Fringe
Book IV of the Masnavi	257	(132)
Introduction
Rumi's Wild Soul Book
Mud and Glory
The Form of the Whole
Being God's Spies
Book IV	270	(119)
A Note on These Translations and on the Currency of Rumi in the United States	389	(3)
Notes	392	(11)
References	403	(7)
Index of Titles and First Lines	410	(12)
Contents of Book IV	422	(3)
Acknowledgments	425

Excerpts

Chapter One

A Green Shawl: Solomon's Far Mosque

In the early 1990s -- it was December -- I was sitting in meditation under the green dome that houses Rumi's tomb in Konya. Someone came up and gave me a green shawl. As you might imagine, I treasure it still and use it in my meditation. I love the wrapped, rapt feeling.

Going in, feeling the limpid contentment in being oneself and the endless discovery there: the green shawl is that, reminiscent of a child's tent-making delight, the rainy-day times when you spread a sheet over a card table and a chair, anchored it with safety pins, and crept under the shelter where imagination could flower. How we forget this tent making for such long spans is a mystery in itself.

Rumi tells of Solomon's practice of building each dawn a place made of intention and compassion and sohbet (mystical conversation). He calls it the "far mosque." Solomon goes there to listen to the plants, the new ones that come up each morning. They tell him of their medicinal qualities, their potential for health, and also the dangers of poisoning.

I suggest we all get green shawls. "Remember, the entrance door to the sanctuary is inside you" ("Entrance Door"). Mary's hiding place and the great warehouse ("What Was Told, That" ) are other images of the listening tent, where conversation thrives and love deepens.

Rumi often hears it as the birdlike song-talk that begins at dawn under the dome of meditation. Build a far mosque where you can read your soul-book and listen to the dreams that grew in the night. Attar says,

Let love lead your soul.

Make it a place to retire to,

a kind of cave, a retreat

for the deep core of being.

 

Entrance Door

How lover and beloved touch is

familiar and courteous, but there

is a strange impulse in that to

create a form that will dissolve

all other shapes. Remember, the

entrance door to the sanctuary is

inside you. We watch a sunlight

dust dance, and we try to be that lively,

but nobody knows what music

those particles hear. Each of us

has a secret companion musician to

dance to. Unique rhythmic play, a

motion in the street we alone know

and hear. Shams is a king of kings

like Mahmud, but there's not another

pearl-crushing dervish Ayaz like me.

 

What Was Told, That

What was said to the rose that made it open was said

to me here in my chest.

What was told the cypress that made it strong

and straight, what was

whispered the jasmine so it is what it is, whatever made

sugarcane sweet, whatever

was said to the inhabitants of the town of Chigil in

Turkestan that makes them

so handsome, whatever lets the pomegranate flower blush

like a human face, that is

being said to me now. I blush. Whatever put eloquence in

language, that's happening here.

The great warehouse doors open; I fill with gratitude,

chewing a piece of sugarcane,

in love with the one to whom every that belongs!

 

Mary's Hiding

Before these possessions you love slip away, say what

Mary said when she was

surprised by Gabriel, I'll hide inside God. Naked in

her room she saw a form

of beauty that could give her new life. Like the sun

coming up, or a rose as it

opens. She leaped, as her habit was, out of herself

into the divine presence.

There was fire in the channel of her breath. Light and

majesty came, I am smoke

from that fire and proof of its existence, more than

any external form.

I want to be where

your bare foot walks,

because maybe before you step,

you'll look at the ground. I want that blessing.

Would you like to have revealed to you

the truth of the Friend?

Leave the rind,

and descend into the pith.

Fold within fold, the beloved

drowns in its own being. This world

is drenched with that drowning.

Imagining is like feeling around

in a dark lane, or washing

your eyes with blood.

You are the truth

from foot to brow. Now,

what else would you like to know?

 

The Husk and Core of Masculinity

Masculinity has a core of clarity, which does not act

from anger or greed or

sensuality, and a husk, which does. The virile center

that listens within takes

pleasure in obeying that truth. Nobility of spirit,

the true spontaneous energy

of your life, comes as you abandon other motives and move

only when you feel the majesty

that commands and is the delight of the self. Remember

Ayaz crushing the king's pearl!

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Soul of Rumi by Rumi, Introduction and notes by Coleman Barks, and contribution by John Moyne. Copyright © 2001 by Coleman Barks. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.