If God said,
"Rumi, pay homage to everything
that has helped you
enter my
arms,"
there would not be one experience of my life,
not one thought, not one feeling,
not any act, I
would not
bow
to.
Rumi
The Guest House
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be cleaning you out
For some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from the beyond.
With a single note the nightingale
Makes me notice the rose,
Falling into that place
Where everything is 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 musical instrument.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
When you start some new work,
you give in completely to it.
You're excited,
because the Creator keeps you
from seeing what's missing.
Your heatedness hides that,
so you do the work, and then look back
and see the nature of it.
If you'd seen that at first,
you wouldn't have done anything!
Don't worry about repenting.
Do the work that's given,
and learn from it.
If you become addicted to looking back,
half your life will be spent in distraction,
and the other half in regret.
You can live better than that!
Find happier friends.
Say: Show me the faults
of my destructive actions, but don't show me
what's wrong with my good work.
That way I won't get disgusted and quit!
Solomon had a habit of visiting the mosque at dawn,
because then he could see
with an early morning eye
the new spirit-plants that were growing.
Encourage that freshness
in yourself, and not what clouds you
with dullness and futility.
On Resurrection Day
God will say,
"What did you do
with the strength and the energy
that your food gave you
on Earth?
How did you use your eyes?
What did you make with your five senses
while they were dimming and playing out?
I gave you hands and feet as tools
for preparing the ground for planting.
Did you, in the health I gave,
do the plowing?"
You will not be able to stand
when you hear those questions.
You will bend double with shame,
and finally acknowledge the glory.
Then you will turn to the right looking to the prophets
for help, as though to say,
I am stuck in the mud of my life.
Help me out of this!
And they will answer,
those kings,
"The time for helping is past.
The plow stands there in the field.
You should have used it."
Then you will turn to the left,
where your family is,
and they will say,
"Don't look at us!
This conversation is between you
and your creator!"
When light returns to its Source,
it takes nothing
of what it has illuminated.
It may have shone on a garbage dump, or a garden,
or in the center of a human eye. No matter.
It goes, and when it does,
the open plain becomes passionately desolate,
wanting it back.
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.
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house empty
of its furniture, still,
treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing, and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I'll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase 'each other'
doesn't make any sense.