(Mystical classics of the world)

I remember enjoyably reading this some years ago, without now recalling its details. ( )

Rumi is everything that we have been accustomed to think that a Muslim cannot be. When we think of a Muslim, we often think of a legalist—an intolerant, possibly violent legalist. But Rumi frustrates legalists of every tradition and description.

When I first read this book several years ago, I wanted something more wholesome than what I had been doing—and Rumi is wholesome—so I started looking for Shams. But in looking for the wholesome, I had the inherited idea, the cultural assumption, of politeness. Rumi is not polite. Rumi is so much bigger than that. Politeness is a sort of guarded appearance. Rumi is the essence beyond appearance, like a sort of rude silence.

And yet, he is also wholesome.

…. Rumi said a lot of cool things, but I think maybe my favorite was:

I gave sexual love with my eyes….
Until one day, I didn’t

For the sparseness of a thing, the multiple ways of getting from A to B, and yet there is a common trysting-place: impermanence….

…. James, brother of Jesus, ends his letter by saying that “love covers a multitude of sins”; usually we take that in relation to ourselves: because I love you, you’ll make me happy and overlook my many sins. But of course, it also works the other way: I love you, so my love covers your sins….

(“My love covers your violence, your greed.”)

I don’t have that down yet, but I’m glad I came across it, because although I didn’t draw another Rumi quote from the last part of the book I read today, (I was planning on the Rumi quote being the end), I guess I needed it this morning, since there are so many liars in the world, of various kinds, and especially the un-subtle ones make me angry; but if I were to get angry at them, the little goblins would laugh at me, cooking by the fire.

Beautiful free translations of the Sufi master that dispense with rhyme and meter, but capture the Zen-like quality of Rumi's parables.

The new poems in the expanded edition are just as good as the old. ( )

I have loved Rumi, and the Coleman Bark's translation, since I was a young girl and my father used to quote from it.

The poetic prose and lyrical flow of the passages compliment the deep wisdom of his words.

This is not a book to be speed read, rather, to be savoured, passage by passage. Each quatrain contains a depth of spiritually to be meditated upon.

Buy this book, incorporate it into your life, read it to your children and grandchildren. You will enrich their lives. ( )