Open Canon - the poets - Rumi

Geoff Browning shares, "Love this exploration. How 'bout Rumi, Rilke, Muir, Thomas Berry, Shakespeare..." So which of their writings would you include?

Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi, but known to the English-speaking world simply as Rumi, was a 13th-century Persian poet, Sunni Islamic jurist, and theologian and mystic:

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Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.


The minute I heard my first love story I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was. Lovers don't finally meet somewhere. They're in each other all along.


When I am with you, we stay up all night.
When you're not here, I can't go to sleep.

Praise God for those two insomnias!
And the difference between them.


Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I will meet you there.


Oh soul,
you worry too much.
You have seen your own strength.
You have seen your own beauty.
You have seen your golden wings.
Of anything less,
why do you worry?
You are in truth
the soul, of the soul, of the soul.


Only from the heart Can you touch the sky.


Let the beauty of what you love be what you do.


Don't grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form.


You were born with wings. Why prefer to crawl through life?


The way you make love is the way
God will be with you.


Everyone has been made for some particular work, and the desire for that work has been put in every heart.


Every tree and plant in the meadow seemed to be dancing, those which average eyes would see as fixed and still.


Christian, Jew, Muslim, shaman, Zoroastrian, stone, ground, mountain, river, each has a secret way of being with the mystery, unique and not to be judged.


Everyone is so afraid of death, but the real sufis just laugh: nothing tyrannizes their hearts. What strikes the oyster shell does not damage the pearl.


If in thirst you drink water from a cup, you see God in it. Those who are not in love with God will see only their own faces in it.


He is a letter to everyone. You open it. It says, 'Live!'


In truth everything and everyone

Is a shadow of the Beloved,

And our seeking is His seeking

And our words are His words...

We search for Him here and there,

while looking right at Him.

Sitting by His side, we ask:

'O Beloved, where is the Beloved?'


God turns you from one feeling to another and teaches you by means of opposites, so that you will have two wings to fly - not one.


Remember, the entrance door to the sanctuary is inside you.


Load the ship and set out. No one knows for certain whether the vessel will sink or reach the harbor. Cautious people say, "I'll do nothing until I can be sure". Merchants know better. If you do nothing, you lose. Don't be one of those merchants who wont risk the ocean.



When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.



Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.



Conventional opinion is the ruin of our souls.



Whatever possessions and objects of its desires the lower self may obtain, it hangs on to them, refusing to let them go out of greed for more, or out of fear of poverty and need.



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What are your favorites? What would you add from Rilke, Muir, Thomas Berry, or Shakespeare?


"Be patient with all that is unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves. Do not seek answers which cannot be given to you now because you would not be able to live them now. And the point is to live everything, to live the question now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."

- Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet