The Heart of Rumi

“Come to the orchard in Spring.
There is light and wine, and sweethearts in the pomegranate flowers.

If you do not come, these do not matter. If you do come, these do not matter.”

Rumi was a 13th century Persian poet who is known for starting the Sufi tradition of whirling dervishes. He was a scholar of Islam until he met his spiritual friend and teacher, Shams.

Through his encounter and friendship with him, Rumi began to feel and embody what he was talking about before, during his religious studies and teachings. After Shams was killed by those who were too jealous of their closeness, Rumi went into his grief over the loss of his intimate, spiritual companion.

It is said that Rumi’s heart broke open through this experience of great loss and grief, and he lost himself in Universal Love, in Ecstatic Union with the Divine, much like Jesus.

Rumi became a poet of love.

“When it’s cold and raining,
You are more beautiful.
And the snow brings me
even closer to Your lips.

The inner secret, that which was never born,
You are that freshness, and I am with You now.

I can’t explain the goings or the comings.
You enter suddenly, and I am nowhere again.

Inside the majesty.”

The Sufis say that the real world is within us and the outside world that we take to be so real is only the means through which we can talk about this huge universe within.

In his writings, Rumi used Arabic words that refer to the play and intersection of human with divine.

Fana is the streaming that moves out into mystery―the annihilation, the orgasmic expansion, the dissolving swoon into the all. Fana opens our wings and makes boredom and hurt disappear. It is human becoming God.

Baqa goes the other way around. It means a living within, life lived with clarity and reason, a refinement, companionship, courtesy and craftsmanship - God becoming human.

The qualities associated with this motion are honesty, sobriety, carefulness, a clarity Rumi calls “reason,” it is compassion and work within a community. Baqa is the return from expansion into each person’s unique individuation work, into pain and effort.

In his poems, Rumi mainly expresses the individual soul’s longing for union with God, which he refers to as “the Beloved.”

“Not Christian or Jew or Muslim,
not Hindu, Buddhist, Sufi, or Zen.
Not any religion or cultural system.

I am not from the east or the west,
not out of the ocean or up from the ground,
not natural or ethereal, not composed of elements at all.

I do not exist, am not an entity in this world or the next,
did not descend from Adam and Eve or any origin story.

My place is the placeless, a trace of the traceless.

Neither body or soul.

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.”

Rumi’s poems are an invitation to die into Life, to look deeply within ourselves, and to work through our struggles both within and in our relationships. He invites us to befriend ourselves and our emotions, to open, to go beyond them and to plunge into the mystery at the core of life. For more on this, read Rumi’s poem “The Guest House.”

This is an invitation to be so fully human that our humanity no longer bothers us.

If you are interested in spirituality and the embodiment of deep love and natural wakefulness, read more about the work I offer here.

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