Rumi: Poet of the Heart Page #4

"Inside water, a waterwheel turns."

"A star circulates with the moon."

"We live in the night ocean wondering,"

"What are these lights?"

"You have said what you are."

"I am what I am."

"Your actions in my head,"

"my head here in my hands"

"with something circling inside."

"I have no name for what circles

so perfectly."

Yeah, yeah. I heard a Sufi say once,

he said...

He asked me what religion I was and

I just threw up my hands.

He said "That's good".

The universe is... love is the religion...

and the universe is the book. So

just read it. Your experience.

The signs of God are in the world,

and the world is in your heart.

Yeah, yeah. But I love books.

The manuscript of nature.

- It is the only scripture.

- Yeah.

Some of us are just hooked on

books, you know.

"Spring,"

"and everything outside is growing,"

"even the tall cypress tree."

"We must not leave this place."

"Around the lip of the cup we share,

these words,"

"My Life Is Not Mine."

"If someone were to play music,"

Okay... okay.

I'll tell you a little story about

my granddaughter, Briney.

Here she is. This is the beloved.

We have an organization that we belong

to, Briney and I...

It's called "Club" and we meet every

Monday night after dinner.

And we do science experiments and

we draw pictures.

And one day we were going up to her

room in the new house...

that they were going to move into soon.

And there was nothing in that room but

just an office desk.

Some students had been renting

out the house...

and there's just this metal office desk.

And we were gonna sit on the floor

there and draw pictures... for Club...

She reached into the desk and pulled

off a bit of adding machine tape...

and ripped it off...

she says "Grandaddy, this is your

permanent ticket to Club".

I said "I never had a permanent

ticket before".

I put it in my pocket and while we

were drawing pictures...

I pulled it out and noticed it had this

very careful calligraphy, on it.

And it turns out that adding machine roll,

some student had copied out...

The entire book, every poem in "Bird Song"...

these little poems, on that thin

adding machine roll.

And she had ripped that off, the first

three and a half poems...

and given it to me as my permanent

ticket to Club.

There's this old celtic thing...

that's there's very little difference

between a song, and a poem...

between a poem and a story...

between a story and prayer.

So that anytime someone is singing a song,

or telling a story...

or telling or reading poetry to a child...

they're also inviting the child

into a prayer.

And there's never a need to take that

down to the level of the child, at all.

Because something in the child

already knows all this...

and is waiting to hear it again...

so that parents or teachers that give

great poetry...

or stories to children...

are feeding this old soul that is in

this child...

and are reassuring the child that they

have come to the right world.

That yes it may be confusing, and the world

may be increasingly chaotic...

but this is the world, where those

words are said.

I think if you bring back poetry into the

lives of our children...

we will transform the world.

We look for all kinds of solutions for

our everyday problems...

Most of the solutions are

purely materialistic.

If you want to take care of the elderly...

have better old folks homes with

more money in them.

If you want to take care of inner

cities...

pour in the funds over there and

it'll solve.

That's not the crisis of our age.

and even if you do see poverty over there...

that's the expression of a deeper

impoverishment.

And that impoverishment is the soul

and the spirit screaming...

for nourishment. And that nourishment

can come from poetry.

Poetry as TS Eliot said is a raid

on the inarticulate.

On the level of 1 to 10,

it's about a 2 to read...

great works on the spirit from the page.

On the level of 1 to 10, it's like a 9

to hear a human being speak it...

especially one you love.

That brings the spirit inside the house,

inside the family...

inside your genetic line.

It's gorgeous, fantastic.

So I would rather read... have

someone read to my children...

three poems then for them to read

30 on the page.

To read a poem privately is

a beautiful...

can be a devotional, prayerful thing.

But to have the poem fall on the drum

of the ear, that's different.

Etheridge Knight, the great African-American

poet used to say...

"The words from my mouth are beating

on the drum in your ear".

So don't think this is casual.

I don't know why he should come back

and be so prevalent...

700 years from his lifetime.

It may be a simple thing.

It may be it's because he's telling a truth,

that we are ready to hear.

And he tells it so clearly, and with such

gentleness...

and with such elegant images....

that we delight to hear his stories.

When something is true,

it can live 700 years or more.

Read Homer or read people that

are older than Rumi, and...

their beauty is just as new today as

it was then.

Very hard to understand for ordinary people.

But they can feel the smell, the fragrance.

Or feel the touch.

Another saying, it's a connection

with the soul.

Even 700 years later, they can

touch the human hearts.

And they do and they will.

Rumi is like bread. It's not like caviar...

that you can have it once in a while,

or never in your life...

but Rumi, like a bread, you

will have it once...

twice, three times, four times, five times,

all the day.

For that your passing every day with Rumi,

not once a day.

I pass now as well, I pass maybe 2 hours,

3 hours.

It's like this with Rumi. And I feel in paradise.

I fly with Rumi. I go to sky.

I will forget that I'm on the earth.

He said:
"I go into the Christian church

and I go into the Muslim mosque"...

"and I go into the Jewish synagogue

and I see one altar."

He saw a single impulse to worship...

at the core of all religions.

When he died, members of every

faith in Konya...

came to his funeral, honoring him...

as they felt that a way of deepening

into their own faith.

That is the reason everyone was there.

Maybe every nation, they love their

own prophets.

Every order they like their own Sheiks.

But everyone loved Muhammad Jall ad-Dn.

He says "I'm not Christian, not Jew

not Muslim"...

"not Hindu not Buddhist."

"I belong to the beloved, have seen the

two worlds as one"...

"and that one, call to and know"...

"first, last, outer, inner"...

"only that breath breathing

human being."

"This we have now is not imagination"

"This is not grief or joy."

"Not a judging state, or an elation,"

"or a sadness,"

"those come and go."

"This is the presence that doesn't."

"It's dawn, Husam,"

"here in the splendor of coral,"

"inside the Friend,"

"in the simple truth of what Hallaj said."

"What else could human beings want?"

"When grapes turn to wine

they're wanting this."

"When the night sky pours by,

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