a pea and an elephant

Without your love, anyone with even the smallest heart

Would live a life of full and heavy hardship.

A lock of your hair is an infinite tangled chain:

The man wise enough to untie that knot is insane.

#667: From Rumi's Kolliyaat-e Shams-e Tabrizi

The night yielded pea and elephant and small yielded this verse. Apart from small/large, associations would include light/heavy and manageable/unwieldy. Rumi refers again to a favourite dichotomy of wise/insane and this suggests to me reductionism/romanticism for the reductionist does seek the simple rounded neat formula or package while the romantic loves to emphasise mystery, complexity, even chaos.

Here is a lock of Rumi's hair and so much is entangled inside it that volumes could be written without end. Any one verse could begin the trail through the labyrinth of love. It is folly to enter but enter I have.

I arrived here with a sour face, like the lady of yesterday's verse. I am tired of love leading nowhere. There must be a balance of body and spirit, romance and reality. Where is this all leading me after all? Is there any purpose to it? Does anyone read it anyway?

I want to purchase minor artwork, ten dollars here, one hundred dollars there. I want to support other artists. I'm stuck, however, for I don't know how to earn money. Surely I must earn before I can spend. How can Rumi resolve this knot?

I really like those last two lines of today's verse. I'll use them as the motto for this blog.