Jelaluddin Rumi

Your grief for what you've lost lifts a mirror
up to where you're bravely working.
Expecting the worst, you look, and instead,
here's the joyful face you've been wanting to see.
Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes.
If it were always a fist or always stretched open,
you would be paralyzed.
Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding,
the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated
as birdwings.

"Can you find another market like this?
Where, with your one rose
you can buy hundreds of rose gardens?
Where, for one seed you get a whole wilderness?
For one weak breath, the divine wind?
You have been fearful of being absorbed
in the ground, or drawn up by the air.
Now your waterbead lets go
and drops into the ocean, where it came from.
This giving up is not a repenting.
it is a deep honoring of yourself.
When the ocean comes to you as a lover,
marry, at once, quickly for God's sake.
Don't postpone it.  Existence has no better gift.
No amount of searching will find this.
A perfect falcon, for no reason,
has landed on your shoulder, and become yours.

"God picks up the reed-flute world and blows.
Each note is a need coming through one of us,
a passion, a longing-pain.
Remember the lips
where the wind-breath originated,
and let your note be clear.
Don't try to end it.
Be your note.
I'll show you how it's enough.
Go up on the roof at night
in this city of the soul.
Let everyone climb on their roofs
and sing their notes!
Sing loud!"

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened.  Don't open the door to the study
and begin reading.  Take down a musical instrument.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.