The world is celebrating the auspicious birthday of Mevlana Jelauddin Rumi, the great dancing mystic whose passionate poems have been sung, whispered, roared, remembered, revered and echoed in the hearts of millions of beings worldwide for 800 years. Every being awakened by one of Rumi’s poems has experienced his words of tender wisdom and the fire of love that blazes across centuries, cultures and religions. We feel the shaking off of ho hum living with his call to live life fully:
You’ve been walking on the ocean’s edge
holding up your robes trying to stay dry
You must dive deeper
1000 times deeper
Every Rumi devotee has their theory of why his poetry has made him the best-selling poet in America, if not the world. Perhaps in an age of contradictions, Rumi reflects a way of being on the spiritual path that embraces and integrates the full spectrum of the human experience with a healing and liberating divine twist. He expresses devotion with nakedness – exposing his wounds, despair and longing alongside his ecstatic celebration which is often toasted with a rascally, unconventional, sexually charged love of God and his guru, Shams.
Love has taken away my practices and filled me with poetry.
I had to clap and sing.
I used to be respectable, chaste and stable
but who can stand in this strong wind and remember those things.
Poems such as “The Guesthouse” are now shared teachings that have transformed how we view the human experience:
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness…
Welcome and entertain them all!
He may be clearing you out for some
new delight.
Other lines such as the famous “…out there in the field beyond wrongdoing and rightdoing” or “let the beauty that we love be what we do” are quoted in conversation as encouraging wisdom from a true friend.
Whispered between lovers and proclaimed at wedding celebrations, Rumi’s voice mirrors the mysterious force of love: “Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along.”
Here is my vote for why Rumi is rocking America: his burning passion for life! His outrageous, openly ecstatic and staggering love songs danced in free expression emerge from the same fire that moves one’s soul off a detour and onto their evolutionary path.
These passionate poems are fueling me these days and inspiring me to go on a pilgrimage to Turkey to see the Whirling Dervish Order honor Rumi’s “wedding night” (what Rumi wanted his students to call his death). These are the very sparks that create a life that could possibly echo 800 years later. Do we dare to live our life with such reverberations? What turns your sparks into a bonfire? What ways of being are covering, dampening our radiance? How are we holding back from the transforming fire of love?
I am reading Rumi every day now and infusing my classes with his bhakti. Throughout this process, I am finding that I am not the same person day by day. The love current is getting stronger in times when it is easy to get freaked out about the state of the world. Poetry is not fanciful rumination but an entryway into the heart temple where we are closest to our truth, vision and wisdom in action. Rumi’s poems are the sacred fuel that is kindled in the moment to moment living – how we see, touch, taste, hear, feel and dance with life in the most everyday as well as its most sublime expressions. As Rumi the passionate, Rumi the full-spectrum divine rascal, Rumi the embodiment of blazing, liberating truth, encourages us:
Your essence is gold hidden in dust.
To reveal its splendor
you need to burn in the fire of love.
Shiva Rea is a yogini and dancing mystic traveling the bhakti path. She is soon to embark on a pilgrimage to Turkey (en route to India) to celebrate Rumi’s 800th birthday and bring back some mojo. Shivarea.com
