Behold the World
My heart is so small
it’s almost invisible.
How can You place
such big sorrows in it?
“Look,” He answered,
“your eyes are even smaller,
yet they behold the world.”
~ Rumi ~
Where do you start when it has all been said?
When you have already been led to your soul, what need to go any further?
When words hold together in a great cycle of meaning, when the end infers the start, and the start infers the end, why would you interrupt such inevitability? Why would you place a stick in the spokes of the rotating wheel in order to understand the lifeless, arrested form when you can watch in wonder at where the turning takes you?
We can gasp at the precision, the cunning, the artistry that has transcended translation but the truth is that words have not transmitted this; hearts have spoken to hearts, souls to souls. How it was always done, maybe even before language. These words – our garbled, poor messengers that speak clumsily of what we are, feel, believe – are just traceries of meaning, symbols of our souls we beam to other souls like lanterns drawing us together in the dark to make one great illumination. The words are nothing in themselves; they can be erased, distorted and misinterpreted. It’s the envelope they travel in that is the vector to God.
This is Rumi, this is poetry (at its best) – you can feel the pure molten magma that gave birth to the explosion of meaning, that showered us with the hot stone of understanding as it fell about us in disbelief that we could feel such heat and love it so, knowing it to be the warmth of another.
It’s like a song where, whatever the words may have said it was actually the music that brought us to ourselves and opened a chasm to a bigger world, a world we only dared look into because a fellow human led us there, in love, across the years, the cultures, the languages. The portal was always greater than any of these.
Rumi gives us ourselves and much beyond. Why deconstruct when we can wonder?
….behold the world.
~ Paul Bryden, Bradford
Rumi's Circle 
Love this!
No words will do justice! My conversation will continue without speech!
excellent, I enjoyed