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[ Music ]
>> When Jelaluddin Rumi spoke his poems spontaneously
in Persian in the 13th century, there was always music nearby.
There had to be because the poetry was in part
and the music were a part of an experiment they did
with the deep listening or sama.
And that listening was meant to remind us
of what a healthy soul feels like,
what the opening heart might be and what it is
to access an intelligence within and perhaps
without our personal-- our personality.
So it is good to have music close by.
And you might even have a little Boch
with the cello of David Darling.
[ Music ]
>> Today, like every other day, we wake up empty and frightened.
Don't open the door to the study and begin reading.
Take down a music instrument.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
I am so small I can barely be seen.
How can this great love be inside me?
That's the question.
How could this great love be inside me?
Then he answers him.
Look at your eyes.
They are small but they see enormous things.
I am so small I can barely be seen.
How can this great love be inside me?
Look at your eyes.
That are small, but they see enormous things.
People ask me how I got involved with the poetry of Rumi.
How does a Presbyterian from Chattanooga get involved
with the greatest poet of Islam in the 13th century?
There are three strands to the answer to that question.
One of them is very credible and involves my meeting
with the American poet, Robert Bly [phonetic].
He handed me-- in June of 1976 he handed me a volume
of translations of Rumi and said, these poems need
to be released from their cages.
And what he meant was they needed to be rephrased
out of their stiff translationee's language
into something more kin to the great American tradition
of free verse that has come down to us through Whitman
and William Carlos Williams and Gulway Channelle [phonetic].
And so Robert-- well, that was a writing exercise, but I took it
as a different kind of thing.
I felt like I was entering a new area and breathing new air.
It's like I felt a sublime sort of relaxation come over me.
And I used it when I got back home here to Athens, Georgia,
I used it as a way to come out of my analytic thinking
and talking everyday, three classes.
After the third class I would go up to the Bluebird Café
in downtown Athens and order some hot tea and sit there
and rephrase Rumi for about an hour on the backs
of their ordering pads.
I still have those little ordering pads.
So this is one strand that I--
for me, it was not anything about publishing.
It was a soul growth practice.
And I did it for about seven years.
Mostly, I mean, just about every day.
And before I published a book called Open Secret
with a little press up in Putney, Vermont.
And the second strand of how I got involved
with Rumi involves the way that we are led
and get advises in dreams.
On May the 2nd, 1977, I had a dream.
I was sleeping out-- and I was not actually--
I had dreamed I was sleeping outdoors on a bluff
above the Tennessee River where I grew up.
And a ball of light rose off of Williams Island and came over me
and clarified from the inside out.
And there was a man there inside the ball of light.
He had his head bowed and he rose his--
he raised his head and he said, I love you.
And I said, I love you too.
And I felt the landscape fill with moisture as was natural.
The dew was forming, but I felt the formation
of the dew in my own body.
And the moisture was love.
A year and a half later I met this man.
You all can believe this or not.
I don't have the luxury because it happened to me.
I met Baba Muhiedine [phonetic]
in Philadelphia a year and a half later.
And I would go up there and tell him my dreams.
And I say I would tell him the dream and he would say,
you don't need to tell me that.
I was there.
I don't know how that works, you know, but there are people
who live on other levels of awareness than I am on anyway.
So that is the second-- I don't think
that I would have much idea what goes on in Rumi's poetry
if I hadn't had that connection to Baba Muhiedine.
The third strand that connects me
with Rumi's poetry is more provable, I guess.
And it involves a childhood joke
that I didn't get until recently.
I grew up on the campus of a boy's school.
My father was head master.
And I was a geography freak.
When I was about six years old, I knew all the capitals
of all the countries in the Rand McNally 1943 atlas.
And as I went across the quadrangle
to dinner teachers would call out names of countries
and I would yell back the capital.
So they would yell Bulgaria and I would say Sophia.
And they would yell Uruguay
and the little smart aleck kid would say Montavideo.
I never missed.
And this perfection went on until the Latin teacher,
James Pennington, decided it had gone on long enough.
And he went down in his basement classroom and got a country
that didn't seem to have a capital and he yelled it
out across the quadrangle.
He said, Cappadocia, Cappadocia.
And he said the look on my face when I went
through my perfect brain and couldn't find it named me.
So from then on he called me Cappadocia.
And people still call me Cappadocia
in Chattanooga or Cap.
And I almost fell down.
And a few years ago when I realized that the capital
of the central city in that region of Anatolia was Iconium
or Conia, where Rumi lived and is buried.
So I didn't know.
I still don't know the capital of Cappadocia.
But so, I was named for my ignorance
for what I didn't know and I liked that.
>> One of Rumi's insights is that there is a core of longing
in every human being and this core, nobody knows
that the core of longing is for.
In this poem he says the longing is for the longing itself.
One night a man was crying-- Allah, Allah, Allah.
His lips grew sweet with the praising until a synic said, so,
I have heard you calling out
but have you ever gotten any response?
The man had no answer for that.
He quit praising and feel into a confused sleep
where he dreamed he saw Hitter, the guide of souls,
in a thick green foliage.
Why did you stop praising?
What did you stop praising?
Because I never heard anything back.
This longing you expressed is the return message.
The grief you cry out from draws you towards union.
Your pure sadness that wants help is the secret cup.
Listen to the moan of the dog for its master.
Listen to the moan of a dog for its master.
That whining is the connection.
There are loved dogs no one knows the name of.
Give your life to be one of them.
One night a man was crying-- Allah, Allah.
One night a woman was crying-- Allah, Allah.
Rumi's poetry sprang spontaneously from the work
that he was doing with a Darvish [phonetic] learning community
in Konya, Turkey.
The work of that was tending to the health of the soul.
And they did it in many ways.
One was just by expressing the natural ecstasy of being alive.
Rumi says that just being in a body
and sentient is cause for rapture.
He also says that form itself, form is ecstatic.
That is, there is a shimmering excitement in form itself.
In another place he says there are three ways
of approaching the divine mystery--
one is prayer, a step up from that is meditation,
and a step up from that is conversation, which is the kind
of inner, outer exchange with that being they call the friend
or the soul or the heart or the beloved.
That exchange is very healthy for the soul.
He says it gives you generosity and modesty and strength
and handsomeness and eloquence.
And what the Sufi's always symbolize by the opening
of the rose, that mystery of the opening of the heart.
So here's his poem about the opening of the heart.
It's good for us to realize and try to respond as he does
to the opening of the rose in this period
of sectarian violence,
surely the opening heart is the way out of it.
What was said to the rose that made it open was said
to me here in my chest.
What was told the cypress that made it strong and straight,
what was whispered to jasmine, so it is what it is.
Whatever made sugar cane sweet, whatever was said
to the inhabitants to the town of Chigil in Turkestan
that makes them so handsome.
Whatever lets the pomegranate flower blush like a human face,
that's happening with me.
I blush. Whatever put eloquence in language,
that's happening here.
The great warehouse doors open and I filled
with gratitude chewing a piece of sugar cane in love
with the one to whomever that belongs.
What was said to the rose that made it open was said
to me here in my chest.
What was told to the cypress, what was whispered
to the jasmine, whatever lets the pomegranate flower blush,
whatever puts eloquence in language, that's happening here.
Don't you love it in the middle of a poem
where the poet says you want to hear what eloquence is?
I'm doing it now.
Whatever put eloquence in language, that's happening here.
The great warehouse doors open and I fill
with gratitude chewing a piece of sugar cane.
Sing it, baby.
[ Music ]
[ Applause ]