Rumi
Rumi
Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī, also known as Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Balkhī, Mawlānā/Mevlânâ, Mevlevî/Mawlawī, and more popularly simply as Rumi, was a 13th-century Persian poet, jurist, Islamic scholar, theologian, and Sufi mystic. Rumi's influence transcends national borders and ethnic divisions: Iranians, Tajiks, Turks, Greeks, Pashtuns, other Central Asian Muslims, and the Muslims of South Asia have greatly appreciated his spiritual legacy for the past seven centuries. His poems have been widely translated into many of the world's languages and transposed into...
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth30 September 1207
Forget safety. Live where you fear to live. Destroy your reputation. Be notorious.
Let silence take you to the core of life.
If you put on shoes that are too tight and walk out across an empty plain, you will not feel the freedom of the place unless you take off your shoes. Your shoe-constriction has you confined. At night before sleeping you take off the tight shoes, and your soul releases into a place it knows. Dreams glide deeper.
Fish love the ocean. Snakes move like earth-fish inside a mountain,well away from seawater. Certain sunfish,though,turn snakes into ocean lovers.
Loaves of bread remind us of sunlight, but when we are inside that orb,we lose interest in building ovens,in millwork and the preparation of fields before the planting.
Physical existence is so cramped.We grow old and bent over like embryos.Nine months passes;it is time to be born. The lamb wants to graze green daylight. There are ways of being born twice,of coming to where you fly,not individually like birds, but as the sun moves with his bride,sincerity.
Free of who I was, free of presence, free of dangerous fear, hope, free of mountainous wanting.
Tie two birds together. They will not be able to fly, even though they now have four wings.
That which is false troubles the heart, but truth brings joyous tranquillity.
Listen! Clam up your mouth and be silent like an oyster shell, for that tongue of yours is the enemy of the soul, my friend. When the lips are silent, the heart has a hundred tongues.
This is what love does and continues to do. It tastes like honey to adults and milk to children.
I closed my mouth and spoke to you in a hundred silent ways.
With passion pray. With passion make love. With passion eat and drink and dance and play. Why look like a dead fish in this ocean of God?
I see my beauty in you.