I am part of the load
Not rightly balanced
I drop off in the grass,
like the old Cave-sleepers, to browse
wherever I fall.
For hundreds of thousands of years I have been dust-grains
floating and flying in the will of the air,
often forgetting ever being
in that state, but in sleep
I migrate back. I spring loose
from the four-branched, time -and-space cross,
this waiting room.
I walk into a huge pasture
I nurse the milk of millennia
Everyone does this in different ways.
Knowing that conscious decisions
and personal memory
are much too small a place to live,
every human being streams at night
into the loving nowhere, or during the day,
in some absorbing work.
(Mathnawi, VI 216-227)
Rumi, 'We Are Three'
Further reading:
Rumi: The Path of Love, by Manuela Dunn Mascetti (Editor) Camille & Kabir Helminski, ( 4 November, 1999) Element Books Ltd
Hush, Don't Say Anything to God : Passionate Poems of Rumi Jalal Al-Din Rumi, Shahram Shiva,s ( 1 October, 1999) Jain Publishing Company
Look! This Is Love Poems of Rumi (Shambhala Centaur Editions) Jalal Al-Din Rumi, et al Published 1996
Rumi's Divan of Shems of Tabriz Selected Odes (Element Classics of World Spirituality) Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi, et al Published 1997
The Way of Passion: A Celebration of Rumi, by Andrew Harvey
The Sufi Path of Love The Spiritual Teachings of Rumi William C. Chittick (Translator) Published 1983
Where Two Oceans Meet A Selection of Odes from the Divan of Shems of Tabriz Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi, James G. Cowan (Translator) Published 1992
