Buoyancy
by Rumi
Love has taken away my practices and filled me with poetry.
I tried to keep quietly repeating No strength but yours, but I couldn’t.
I had to clap and sing. I used to be respectable, chaste and stable, but who can stand in this strong wind and remember those things?
A mountain keeps an echo deep inside itself. That is how I hold your voice.
I am scrap wood thrown in your fire, quickly reduced to smoke and ash.
I saw you and became that empty. This emptiness, more beautiful than existence, it obliterates existence, and yet when it comes, existence thrives and creates more existence.
The sky is blue. The world is a blind man sitting beside the road.
But whoever sees your emptiness sees beyond the blue and the blind man.
A great soul hides like Muhammad or Jesus moving through a crowd in a city where no one knows him.
To praise is to praise how one surrenders to the emptiness.
To praise the sun is to praise your own eyes. Praise, the ocean. What we say, a little ship.
So the journey goes on, and no one knows where.
Just to be held by the ocean is the best luck we could have. It is a total waking up.
Why should we grieve that we have been sleeping? It does not matter how long we have been unconscious.
We are groggy, but let the guilt go. Feel the motions of tenderness around you. the buoyancy.
