Poems of Passion by Rumi
Love is considered to be the most sacred feeling of all. When you feel love for someone, you are at the highest vibration of your being. A feeling of pure love can overpower and purify any other feeling, be it positive or negative. There can not be a better way to cleanse your soul, mind and inner-being, than a pure and intense feeling of love, as it is rightly said -
Rumi was born in Wakhsh (Tajikistan) under the administration of Balkh on September 30, 1207 to a family of learned theologians. Escaping the Mongol invasion and destruction, Rumi and his family traveled extensively in the Muslim lands, performed pilgrimage to Mecca and finally got settled in Konya, Anatolia, then part of Seljuk Empire. When his father Bahaduddin Valad passed away, Rumi succeeded his father in year 1231 as a professor in religious sciences. Rumi 24 years old, was an already accomplished scholar in religious and positive sciences.
He was introduced into the mystical path by a wandering dervish, Shamsuddin of Tabriz. His love and his bereavement for the death of Shams found their expression in a surge of music, dance and lyric poems, "Divani Shamsi Tabrizi". Rumi is the author of six volume didactic epic work, the "Mathnawi", called as the "Koran in Persian" by Jami, and discourses, "Fihi ma Fihi", written to introduce his disciples into metaphysics.
If there is any general idea underlying Rumi's poetry, it is the absolute love for God. His influence on thought, literature and all forms of aesthetic expression in the world of Islam cannot be overrated.
Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi died on December 17, 1273. Men of five faiths followed his bier. That night was named Sebul Arus (Night of Union). Ever since, the Mawlawi dervishes have kept that date as a festival.
Stay close, my heart, to the one who knows your ways;
Come into the shade of the tree that allays has fresh flowers.
Don't stroll idly through the bazaar of the perfume-markers:
Stay in the shop of the sugar-seller.
If you don't find true balance, anyone can deceive you;
Anyone can trick out of a thing of straw,
And make you take it for gold
Don't squat with a bowl before every boiling pot;
In each pot on the fire you find very different things.
Not all sugarcanes have sugar, not all abysses a peak;
Not all eyes possess vision, not every sea is full of pearls.
O nightingale, with your voice of dark honey! Go on lamenting!
Only your drunken ecstasy can pierce the rock's hard heart!
Surrender yourself, and if you cannot be welcomes by the Friend,
Know that you are rebelling inwardly like a thread
That doesn't want to go through the needle's eye!
The awakened heart is a lamp; protect it by the him of your robe!
Hurry and get out of this wind, for the weather is bad.
And when you've left this storm, you will come to a fountain;
You'll find a Friend there who will always nourish your soul.
And with your soul always green, you'll grow into a tall tree
Flowering always with sweet light-fruit, whose growth is interior.
"Let the fire of love, purify your within, let it burn you, cleanse you, purify you and take you with itself to the source power. "
The name Mowlana Jalaluddin Rumi stands for Love and ecstatic flight into the infinite. Rumi is one of the great spiritual masters and poetical geniuses of mankind and was the founder of the Mawlawi Sufi order, a leading mystical brotherhood of Islam.
Rumi was born in Wakhsh (Tajikistan) under the administration of Balkh on September 30, 1207 to a family of learned theologians. Escaping the Mongol invasion and destruction, Rumi and his family traveled extensively in the Muslim lands, performed pilgrimage to Mecca and finally got settled in Konya, Anatolia, then part of Seljuk Empire. When his father Bahaduddin Valad passed away, Rumi succeeded his father in year 1231 as a professor in religious sciences. Rumi 24 years old, was an already accomplished scholar in religious and positive sciences.
He was introduced into the mystical path by a wandering dervish, Shamsuddin of Tabriz. His love and his bereavement for the death of Shams found their expression in a surge of music, dance and lyric poems, "Divani Shamsi Tabrizi". Rumi is the author of six volume didactic epic work, the "Mathnawi", called as the "Koran in Persian" by Jami, and discourses, "Fihi ma Fihi", written to introduce his disciples into metaphysics.
If there is any general idea underlying Rumi's poetry, it is the absolute love for God. His influence on thought, literature and all forms of aesthetic expression in the world of Islam cannot be overrated.
Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi died on December 17, 1273. Men of five faiths followed his bier. That night was named Sebul Arus (Night of Union). Ever since, the Mawlawi dervishes have kept that date as a festival.
POEMS
1. LOVE IS THE MASTER
Love is the One who masters all things;
I am mastered totally by Love.
By my passion of love for Love
I have ground sweet as sugar.
O furious Wind, I am only a straw before you;
How could I know where I will be blown next?
Whoever claims to have made a pact with Destiny
Reveals himself a liar and a fool;
What is any of us but a straw in a storm?
How could anyone make a pact with a hurricane?
God is working everywhere his massive Resurrection;
How can we pretend to act on our own?
In the hand of Love I am like a cat in a sack;
Sometimes Love hoists me into the air,
Sometimes Love flings me into the air,
Love swings me round and round His head;
I have no peace, in this world or any other.
The lovers of God have fallen in a furious river;
They have surrendered themselves to Love's commands.
Like mill wheels they turn, day and night, day and night,
Constantly turning and turning, and crying out.
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2. STAY CLOSE, MY HEART
Stay close, my heart, to the one who knows your ways;
Come into the shade of the tree that allays has fresh flowers.
Don't stroll idly through the bazaar of the perfume-markers:
Stay in the shop of the sugar-seller.
If you don't find true balance, anyone can deceive you;
Anyone can trick out of a thing of straw,
And make you take it for gold
Don't squat with a bowl before every boiling pot;
In each pot on the fire you find very different things.
Not all sugarcanes have sugar, not all abysses a peak;
Not all eyes possess vision, not every sea is full of pearls.
O nightingale, with your voice of dark honey! Go on lamenting!
Only your drunken ecstasy can pierce the rock's hard heart!
Surrender yourself, and if you cannot be welcomes by the Friend,
Know that you are rebelling inwardly like a thread
That doesn't want to go through the needle's eye!
The awakened heart is a lamp; protect it by the him of your robe!
Hurry and get out of this wind, for the weather is bad.
And when you've left this storm, you will come to a fountain;
You'll find a Friend there who will always nourish your soul.
And with your soul always green, you'll grow into a tall tree
Flowering always with sweet light-fruit, whose growth is interior.
(translated by Andrew Harvey)
I am not a love guru as you see in MTV and other stupid radio channels but I want to share what I think about your statement “there can not be a better way to cleanse your soul, mind and inner-being, than a pure and intense feeling of love”!
ReplyDeleteI don’t know if you are aware that human senses switch to a fail safe mode when they sense accidents which could take your life. You feel unconscious and the next time you are back to your senses, you will never be able to recollect what happened. I am not talking about accidents where a truck comes and hit you on your back or on your side when you are driving a car. I am talking about head-on accidents where you see the real face of death for at least a fraction of a second!
I have been a victim to a deadly accident. It was a head-on bike accident and it’s been 7 or 8 years from now and I cannot remember a thing! The last thing I remember was tightening the strap of my guitar bag before I took the bridge and BANG!
When I was in the Intensive Care Unit of the hospital, I asked the doctor “Who are you? Why am I here? Am I already dead”? She replied “You are an engineering student and shouldn’t be nervous like this”! It took me some time to re-collect my residence number and pass it onto the doctor and others who got me to the hospital and I took even more time to recollect my name!
I am not taking credit in being an accident victim but the message I want to convey is; after the accident, I realized that life is too short to complain or to love someone or to be satisfied. It takes 1/100th of a second to lose your life. You wait at a bus-stop and the bus could come running onto you! Who knows? I love food and when I was once asked “How would you prefer to die”? I replied “I would like to die by getting an awesome, tasty, delicious idly stuck-up on my throat and die due to suffocation! :-)
I don’t know how to put in the right way but when you know that you are living your second life…obviously you feel like living it in a different way (cleaned soul, mind and inner-being) than you have been living all these years! At least I can say my life was different before and after an accident! I feel like love is not the hero…death is the real hero!