Sept 7 — “Open your hands, if you want to be held. . . . “
I seem to keep meeting Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi lately. This poem is part of the weekly 7 poem selection edited by “A Year of Being Here” http://www.ayearofbeinghere.com/. Labor Day should be lazy time so I’ll just send another Rumi poem, originally written in Farsi.
Have a lovely day off.
john sj
p.s. In the kinship of our families probably all of us can remember women and men who worked with hand and muscle skills that helped us to be born and to live. This Labor Day I remember Grandma Clara who managed the family dairy farm about 10 miles from my house. There, as a kid, I learned not to be afraid of large animals like cows or sudden animals like guinea hens. Only many years later did I perceive that she also knew how to welcome this little town boy to play among the tools, the manure, the pastures and the animals with the freedom of knowing that I was not only welcome but also safe. Safe to explore and run little kid risks. Grandma Clara did all that when I didn’t yet know enough to notice. But I must have noticed; here I am still remembering that great woman.
Image result for guinea hens
a guinea hen;
Today’s Post: “A Community of the Spirit” by Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi.
There is a community of the spirit.
Join it, and feel the delight
of walking in the noisy street
and being the noise.
Drink all your passion,
and be a disgrace.
Close both eyes
to see with the other eye.
Open your hands,
if you want to be held.
Sit down in this circle.
Quit acting like a wolf, and feel
the shepherd’s love filling you.
At night, your beloved wanders.
Don’t accept consolations.
Close your mouth against food.
Taste the lover’s mouth in yours.
You moan, “She left me.” “He left me.”
Twenty more will come.
Be empty of worrying.
Think of who created thought!
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.
Text as published in The Essential Rumi, translated from the original Farsi by Coleman Barks with John Moyne (HarperCollins Publishers, 1995). An online version of the original Farsi text couldn’t be located.