Rumi bits

Who looks out with my eyes? What is the soul?

I cannot stop asking.

If I could taste one sip of an answer,

I could break out of this prison for drunks.

I didn't come here of my own accord, and I can't leave that way.

Whoever brought me here will have to take me home.

We have a huge barrel of wine, but no cups.

That's fine with us. Every morning

we glow and in the evening we glow again.

Why do you stay in prison

when the door is so wide open?

Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking.

Live in silence.

Flow down and down in always

widening rings of being.

God said,

    "The world is a play, a children's game,

and you are the children."

        God speaks the truth.

If you haven't left the child's play,

how can you be an adult?

        Without purity of spirit,

if you're still in the middle of lust and greed

and other wantings, you're like children

playing

Don't wait till you die to see this.

Recognize that your imagination and your thinking

and your sense perception are reed canes

that children cut and pretend are horsies.

Gone, inner and outer,

no moon, no ground or sky.

Don't hand me another glass of wine.

Pour it in my mouth.

I've lost the way to my mouth.

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.

Drink from the presence of saints,

not from those other jars.

Every object, every being,

is a jar full of delight.

THE NEW RULE

It's the old rule that drunks have to argue

and get into fights.

The lover is just as bad. He falls into a hole.

But down in that hole he finds something shining,

worth more than any amount of money or power.

Last night the moon came dropping its clothes in the street.

I took it as a sign to start singing,

falling up into the bowl of sky.

The bowl breaks. Everywhere is falling everywhere.

Nothing else to do.

Here's the new rule: break the wineglass,

and fall toward the glassblower's breath.

Neither words, nor any natural fact

can express this.

But what can stay hidden?

Love's secret is always lifting its head

out from under the covers,

"Here I am!"

There is an original inside me.

What's here is a mirror for that, for you.

Late, by myself, in the boat of myself,

no light and no land anywhere,

cloudcover thick. I try to stay

just above the surface, yet I'm already under

and living within the ocean.

'Lo, I am with you always'  means when you look for God,

God is in the look of your eyes,

in the thought of looking, nearer to you than your self,

or things that have happened to you.

There's no need to go outside.

Be melting snow.

Wash yourself of yourself.

A True Man stares at his old shoes

and sheepskin jacket. Every day he goes up

to his attic to look at his work-shoes and worn-out coat.

This is his wisdom, to remember the original clay

and not get drunk with ego and arrogance.

To visit those shoes and jacket

is praise.

The Absolute works with nothing.

The workshop, the materials

are what does not exist.

Try and be a sheet of paper with nothing on it.

Be a spot of ground where nothing is growing,

where something might be planted,

a seed, possibly, from the Absolute.

There is a light seed grain inside.

You fill it with yourself, or it dies.

I'm caught in this curling energy! Your hair!

Whoever's calm and sensible is insane!

Do you think I know what I'm doing?

That for one breath or half-breath I belong to myself?

As much as a pen knows what it's writing,

or the ball can guess where it's going next.

QUIETNESS

Inside this new love, die.

Your way begins on the other side.

Become the sky.

Take an axe to the prison wall.

Escape.

Walk out like someone suddenly born into color.

Do it now.

You're covered with thick cloud.

Slide out the side. Die,

and be quiet. Quietness is the surest sign

that you've died.

Your old life was a frantic running

from silence.

The speechless full moon

comes out now.