love's crazy high

The whole world worries over your sweet face.

For the love of that face men tear their clothes.

All around you, art flows from those nearby.

Their wisdom fails beside your crazy high.

#1400: From Rumi's Kolliyaat-e Shams-e Tabrizi

Search word: whole

I sense that I am healing, becoming more whole. This companionship with Rumi, this daily contemplation of a love quatrain, is bringing about healing. A sadness over the rupture with Renata and her subsequent disappearance still hovers but life is made of both clouds and sunshine, fresh acquaintance and loss also. Last night I watched Career Girls on her recommendation. It was a strange, an unusual movie, but simple and sweet in its way. The chemistry and the conversation between the two heroines made classic cinema. Thank you, Renata, for pointing me there.

I feel I need to catch up somewhat because I wrote next to nothing on yesterday's verse. It was too big a topic. Our love of life is expressed in our passions, in our fallings in love, in our lust for the intoxication of good food and good comanionship around a table with the wine flowing freely. When we realize this, we realize heaven on earth and, dimly at first but then more solidly, we realize the marriage of heaven and earth. One side of that marriage is eternal, the other is right here now. Rumi, in his way, is both pointing to and realizing the marriage. His is not the last word: this marriage will always want new words written about it.

Rumi seems to address that very point in today's verse. He suggests that the arts flourish as a response to love but then he reminds us that it is the love experience itself that matters. All the words (and paintings and movies) are but dust beside the reality.