Don't be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth.
Rumi
Be empty of worrying.
Think of who created thought!
Why do you stay in prison
When the door is so wide open?
Rumi
Be melting snow.
Wash yourself of yourself.
Rumi
When you go through a hard period,
When everything seems to oppose you,
... When you feel you cannot even bear one more minute,
NEVER GIVE UP!
Because it is the time and place that the course will divert!
Rumi
Respond to every call
that excites your spirit.
Rumi
Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love. It will not lead you astray.
Rumi
Let the lover be disgraceful, crazy, absentminded. Someone sober will worry about things going badly. Let the lover be.
Rumi
These pains you feel are messengers. Listen to them.
Rumi
Your hand opens and closes, opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralysed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as birds' wings.
Rumi
There is a secret medicine given only to those who hurt so hard they can't hope.
The hopers would feel slighted if they knew.
Rumi
God turns you from one feeling to another and teaches by means of opposites so that you will have two wings to fly, not one
Rumi
Drum sound rises on the air, its throb, my heart.
A voice inside the beat says, "I know you're tired, but come. This is the way.
Rumi
Moonlight floods the whole sky from horizon to horizon;
How much it can fill your room depends on its windows.
Rumi
You are so weak. Give up to grace.
The ocean takes care of each wave till it gets to shore.
You need more help than you know.
Rumi
Don't try to steer the boat.
Don't open shop for yourself. Listen. Keep silent.
You are not God's mouthpiece. Try to be an ear,
And if you do speak, ask for explanations.
Rumi
What matters is how quickly you do what your soul directs.
Rumi
You have forgotten the One
who doesn't care about ownership,
who doesn't try to turn a profit
from every human exchange.
Rumi
You're water. We're the millstone.
You're wind. We're dust blown up into shapes.
You're spirit. We're the opening and closing
of our hands. You're the clarity.
We're the language that tries to say it.
You're joy. We're all the different kinds of laughing.
Rumi
Whoever's calm and sensible is insane!
Rumi
The same wind that uproots trees
makes the grass shine.
The lordly wind loves the weakness
and the lowness of grasses.
Never brag of being strong.
The axe doesn't worry how thick the branches are.
It cuts them to pieces. But not the leaves.
It leaves the leaves alone.
Rumi
There are thousands of wines
that can take over our minds.
Don't think all ecstasies
are the same!
Jesus was lost in his love for God.
His donkey was drunk with barley.
Rumi
I don't want learning, or dignity, or respectability. I want this music, and this dawn, and the warmth of your cheek against mine.
Rumi
There is a basket of fresh bread on your head, yet you go door to door asking for crusts.
Rumi
Lovers don't finally meet somewhere. They're in each other all along.
Rumi
I will be waiting here....
For your silence to break,
For your soul to shake,
For your love to wake!
Rumi
There is a secret medicine given only to those who hurt so hard they can't hope.
Rumi
Soul, if you want to learn secrets,
your heart must forget about
shame
and dignity.
You are God's lover,
yet you worry
what people
are saying.
Rumi
Brother, stand the pain.
Escape the poison of your impulses.
The sky will bow to your beauty, if you do.
Learn to light the candle. Rise with the sun.
Turn away from the cave of your sleeping.
That way a thorn expands to a rose.
Rumi
There's no one with intelligence in this town except that man over there playing with the children, the one riding the stick horse. He has keen, fiery insight and vast dignity like the night sky, but he conceals it in the madness of child's play.
Rumi
Knowledge that is acquired
is not like this. Those who have it worry if
audiences like it or not.
It's a bait for popularity.
Disputational knowing wants customers.
It has no soul...
The only real customer is God.
Chew quietly
your sweet sugarcane God-Love, and stay
playfully childish.
Rumi
Gamble everything for love, if you are a true human being. If not, leave this gathering. Half-heartedness doesn’t reach into majesty.
Rumi
Are you jealous of the ocean’s generosity?
Why would you refuse to give
this joy to anyone?
Fish don’t hold the sacred liquid in cups!
They swim the huge fluid freedom.
Rumi
This poetry. I never know what I'm going to say.
I don't plan it.
When I'm outside the saying of it,
I get very quiet and rarely speak at all.
Rumi
Without the frown of clouds and lightning, the vines would be burned by the smiling sun.
Rumi
You run back and forth listening for unusual events,
peering into the faces of travelers.
"Why are you looking at me like a madman?"
I have lost a friend. Please forgive me.
Rumi
What can I do, Dear Ones ?
I do not know myself.
I am neither Christian nor Jew,
neither Magian nor Muslim,
I am not from east or west,
not from land or sea,
not from the shafts of nature
nor from the spheres of the firmament,
not of the earth, not of water,
not of air, not of fire.
I am not from the highest heaven,
not from this world,
not from existence, not from being.
I am not from India, not from China,
not from Bulgar, not from Saqsin,
not from the realm of the two Iraqs,
not from the land of Khurasan.
I am not from the world, not from beyond,
not from heaven and not from hell.
I am not from Adam, not from Eve,
not from paradise and not from Ridwan.
My place is placeless, my trace is traceless,
no body, no soul, I am from the soul of souls.
I have chased out duality, lived the two worlds as one.
One I seek, one I know, one I see, one I call.
He is the first, he is the last,
he is the outer, he is the inner.
Beyond He and He is I know no other.
I am drunk from the cup of love,
the two worlds have escaped me.
I have no concern but carouse and rapture.
If one day in my life I spend a moment without you
from that hour and that time I would repent my life.
If one day I am given a moment in solitude with you
I will trample the two worlds underfoot and dance forever.
O Beloved , I am so tipsy here in this world,
I have no tale to tell but tipsiness and rapture.
Rumi
The Ripe Fig
Now that You live here in my chest,
anywhere we sit is a mountaintop.
And those other images,
which have enchanted people
like porcelain dolls from China,
which have made men and women weep
for centuries, even those have changed now.
What used to be pain is a lovely bench
where we can rest under the roses.
A left hand has become a right.
A dark wall, a window.
A cushion in a shoe heel,
the leader of the community!
Now silence. What we say
is poison to some
and nourishing to others.
What we say is a ripe fig,
but not every bird that flies
eats figs.
Rumi
When there are miles to go before we sleep, altered traits are more important than altered states.
Huston Smith
But can you think of anyone who's not hazy with smoke?
Rumi
My sweet heart,
you have aroused my passion,
your touch has filled me with desire,
I am no longer separate from you,
these are precious moments,
I beseech you,
don’t let me wait,
Rumi
[…the work of the (Muslim Sufi) dervish community
was to open the heart,
explore the mystery of union,
to fiercely search for and try to say the truth,
and to celebrate the glory and difficulty
in being in human incarnation.]
You are sitting here with us,
but you are also out walking in a field at dawn.
You are yourself the animal we hunt
when you come with us on the hunt.
You are in your body
like a plant is solid in the ground,
yet you are wind.
You are the diver's clothes
lying empty on the beach.
You are the fish.
In the ocean are many bright strands
and many dark strands like veins that are seen
when a wing is lifted up.
Your hidden self is blood in those,
those veins that are lute strings
that make ocean music,
not the sad edge of surf,
but the sound of no shore.
Rumi
Birdsong brings relief
to my longing.
I am just as ecstatic as they are,
but with nothing to say!
Please, universal soul, practice
some song, or something, through me!
Rumi
