Buoyancy

Love can make up for a great many things that are missing in your life. But, if you don't have love, no matter what else you have, it is never enough.
~Ann Landers

I had a wonderful, heart-opening experience last night. A group of friends from my former spiritual community got together for dinner. I felt completely buoyant at the end, uplifted by the power of love in all of its forms. I love rekindling my sense of community, reconnecting with old friends who better understand this path that I am on. It feels better than good--it feels necessary.

Riding this wave of love, I pulled out my new book this morning: Ten Poems to Open Your Heart, by Roger Housden. Not only does he have unfaltering taste in poetry that moves and awakens you, his commentary is powerful and enlightening. I picked this up as part of my own heart opening process and loved rediscovering this gem of Rumi's. Rumi writes some of the most beautiful love poetry in the world, perhaps because it is to that divinity within and around us. I will leave you to the simple power of his words. Namaste.

Buoyancy
by Rumi (translated by Coleman Barks)

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 and chaste and stable,
but who can stand in this strong wind
and remember those things?

A mountain keeps an echo deep inside itself.
That's how I hold your voice.

I am scrap wood thrown in your fire,
and quickly reduced to smoke.

I saw you and became 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
squatting on the road.

But whoever sees your emptiness
sees beyond blue and beyond the blind man.

A great soul hides, like Mohammed, 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 sea-journey goes on, and who knows where!
Just to be held by the ocean is the best luck
we could have. It's a total waking up!

Why should we grieve that we've been sleeping?
It doesn't matter how long we've been unconscious.

We're groggy, but let the guilt go.
Feel the motions of tenderness
around you, the buoyancy.

Photo: "you find love in the most unexpected places," originally uploaded by Alex

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