Rumi's "wedding night"

It is December 17, the date Rumi lovers call his wedding night, for it is when he went to join the Beloved, the day he died in Konya, forever ending the agony of separateness:

A craftsman pulled a reed from the reedbed,
cut holes in it, and called it a human being.

Since then, it has been wailing
a tender agony of parting,
never mentioning the skill
that gave it life as a flute.

The earth is frozen around me, feeling as if Life has gone. But Rumi's call is always to that inner heat that brings spring to the spirit.

Outside, the freezing desert night.
This other night inside grows warm, kindling.
Let the landscape be covered with thorny crust.
We have a soft garden in here.
The continents blasted,
cities and little towns, everything
become a scorched, blackened ball.

The news we hear is full of grief for that future,
but the real news inside here
is there's no news at all.

* * *

This is the day and the year of the rose.
The whole garden is opening with laughter.  

Iris whispering to cypress.
The rose is the joy of meeting someone. 

The rose is a world imagination cannot imagine.
A messenger from the orchard where the soul lives.  

A small seed that points to a great rose tree.
Hold its hand and walk like a child.  

A rose is what grows from the work the prophets do.
Full moon, new moon. 

Accept the invitation spring extends,
four birds flying toward a master.  

A rose is all these,
and the silence that closes and sits in the shade, a bud. 

And lest we forget, the cycle goes back the other way, too. The full moon becomes less. The flower opens so far that it falls, petal by petal, becoming the ground. If there's one thing Rumi's taught me, it is that when one thing comes, its seeming opposite is also right there coming behind. The wise man followed by the fool, crying followed by laughter. There is an ocean, and all of experience is in it, all different ways of knowing God. We're in a river flowing toward it.

My worst habit is I get so tired of winter
I become a torture to those I'm with.

If you are not here, nothing grows.
I lack clarity. My words
tangle and knot up.

How to cure bad water? Send it back to the river.
How to cure bad habits? Send me back to you.

When water gets caught in habitual whirlpools,
dig a way out through the bottom
to the ocean. There is a secret medicine
given only to those who hurt so hard
they can't hope.

The hopers would feel slighted if they knew.

Look as long as you can at the friend you love,
no matter whether that friend is moving away from you
or coming back toward you.

Another year closes, just one of our inept categories, like insufficient words to express the mystery we follow. Truly, every next moment begins a new year. Go back to the river. Start flowing again.

Maybe this is one reason I love winter: It feels like a clean page.

— all Rumi translated by Coleman Barks

English advising office

Outside, below my sixth

floor window, campus sits

in a snow globe, just shaken.

Black figures walk

precariously, cars and buses

creep along lines of a mini-world.

But I am the one inside,

helping students plan next semester,

to peer into worlds of Whitman,

Thoreau, Wilde, past the glass

of their own bubble,

which I discern from my side

of the desk—tapping, turning

it ‘round and ‘round,

seeing what parts are movable

and which are fixed, and in my own

pleasure, seeing ahead in that crystal

that if they are lucky, when they step

from sphere to sphere, each writer

will shake loose what happily

obscures our all-too-clear vision

A walk at the beginning of winter

I leave the house, pass

the dried hydrangea and

the sunflower, black, lying on its side,

pokeberry stems crumpling

to the ground, branches and trees

snapped in the storm,

their raw points

straddling a new age.

Walking through leaves

my eye falls on a few—

silvery Russian olive,

spread loosely like a pattern

on a hall runner, gingerbread

oak and fans of poplar,

caught and hunched

at the wall of meadow grass—

and, quickly forgotten,

soon buried under falling snow,

they are as all the days

of all the years fallen since

I lay alone in childhood, the first   

to bed, lamplight from the street

twisting shapes and the day’s

play into amplified terrors:

Will I die in fire?

Will a tornado tear the house

      up by the roots?

Will cold fingers touch and clutch

     my arm?

In the dark we played combat

around the Methodist church,

where Nazis hid in brick

and shrub. And now

in the black woods

behind our field at night

they are almost visible,

running to me.

In daylight I round

the meadow path

at the foot of those trees

where lies a soldier

in army green. He looks

like last year’s fallen tree,

sweatered in moss. I step

over him. I step over him

as winter steps over autumn,

without compunction,

as God steps over the earth

in the wind, not pausing

as he snaps us free

coffee, tea, they and we

In a week and a half we trundled between four houses. We visited friends in Ohio one weekend, back home for the work week, then a weekend with our grandson in their apartment while his parents got away. We arrived home Sunday with a storm that took out power (and a mighty spruce), so we moved into our son’s house in town until power was restored two days later.

Personal rituals and routines lay dormant in our dark farmhouse, next to the broom and dustpan. Meditating or talking in the hot tub under our particular night sky rising from behind the barn. Reading, writing and correspondence with morning coffee in my hand-thrown mug and its chipped notch. The familiar dark, lit by a wood fire, alone while my husband sleeps. My little closet with clothes, shoes and necklaces in my mother’s baby blue jewelry box. Without home habits I felt like a leaf or branch skimming along the surface of the grass.

I didn’t feel ill at ease in anyone’s home. I slept well, the food was very good. I drank morning coffee in a mug chosen from a pretty array in each house. I bore the weight of having all our needs and preferences closely attended, of being conspicuously happy. We had clean sheets and towels, nightlights and conversation. It became humbling, really, to be the focus of comfort for three sets of hosts in such a short time. You must submit to the pose of receiving, and breathe.

Intimate things happen when staying overnight. The sound of feet passing on the wood floor outside our room. The dog’s nails stopping at the door, her nose reaching for me still in bed. Entering the kitchen shyly in freshly washed face, pajamas, taking coffee back to the chair chosen the night before as temporary territory. Being under the same roof for days on end, surrendering to the routines of others, playing at them as if they are your own.

At our son’s house each evening they offered us tea made in the Keureg machine. We rarely drink tea. But our son and his wife pulled out big white bowl-mugs they’d picked in their bridal registry last year, and read the list of teas, sounding irresistible. They chose sugar cookie the first night, cinnamon the second, so we took the same. I felt my soul reach for this tea, in this living room, with these our children. I was a genuine tea drinker for two days, joined in their ceremony that was just a vehicle for conversation.

Thanksgiving is next week, the start of holidays together with our children, their spouses and our grandson at the farm. I’ll experience the other side, as host, sharing our space and habits.

Rumi said that

When you are not with close friends,
you are not in the presence.

It is sad to leave the people you travel with.
How much moreso those who remind you of God.
Hurry back to the ones protecting you.

On every trip, have only one objective,
to meet those who are friends
inside the presence.

If you stay home, keep the same purpose,
to meet the innermost presence
as it lives in people.

Be a pilgrim to the kaaba inside a human being,
and Mecca will rise into view on its own.

Ultimately, we are all wayfaring strangers looking for home, the inner presence. Rilke said that even in very unfamiliar circumstances, our solitude can be a home and support.

This is where I want to be this holiday, inside the kaaba of human beings I love. And in my comfort, they will hopefully find their own.