Looking for your Face

From the beginning of my life I have been looking for your face, but today I have seen it.  Today I have seen the charm, the beauty, the unfathomable grace of the face I was looking for.  Today I have found you, and those who laughed and scorned me yesterday are sorry that they were not looking as I did.  I am bewildered by the magnificence of your beauty, and wish to see you with a hundred eyes.  My heart has burned with passion and has searched forever for this wondrous beauty that I now behold.  I ashamed to call this love human and afraid of God to call it divine.  Your fragrant breath, like the morning breeze, has come to the stillness of the garden.  You have breathed new life into me.  I have become your sunshine, and also your shadow.  My soul is screaming in ecstasy.  Every fiber of my being is in love with you.  Your effulgence has lit a fire in my heart, and you have made radiant for me the earth and sky.  My arrow of love has arrived at the target.  I am in the house of mercy, and my heart is a place of prayer. 

          --Rumi

Photo Courtesy of Clean Plate Pictures

Turn Me Like A Waterwheel Turning A Millstone

Turn me like a waterwheel turning a millstone.

Plenty of water, Living Water.

Keep me in one place and scatter the love.

Leaf moves in a wind, straw drawn toward amber,

all parts of the world are in love,

but they do not tell their secrets: Cows grazing

on a sacramental table, ants whispering in Solomon’s ear.

Mountains mumbling an echo. Sky, calm.

If the sun were not in love, he would have no brightness,

the side of the hill no grass on it.

The ocean would come to rest somewhere.

Be a lover as they are, that you come to know

your Beloved. Be faithful that you may know

Faith. The other parts of the universe did not accept

the next responsibility of love as you can.

They were afraid they might make a mistake

with it, the inspired knowing

that springs from being in love.

--Rumi

The Ruins of the Heart

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.

--Rumi