a time to wake up

If love makes you thirst, never fear: you have wine.

If your body's a ruin, don't worry: there's treasure inside.

You've run out of water? No, your water is near.

Wake up: this world that you dream holds nothing to fear.

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

Key idea: thirst

I've picked up on the theme of thirst, having failed to discuss it yesterday. My current mood is grim as I am preoccupied with decay, death, dissolution. I can see I'm entering into a nigredo state of mind. It's time for me to break up old patterns of thought and perception. I'm aware of this passing away but only very faintly aware of new buds on the horizon. My business colleague has left on a short trip, some time away so she can think things through. Perhaps I am also withdrawing a little as I prepare to make a leap ... or decide against it.

I've picked up from the library and started reading Jacques Lacarrière's The Gnostics with its amazing front cover illustration:

Serpent in the sky @ amazon.com

As I started reading, I was reminded of how the early Christian gnostics repudiated the world as we know it conventionally. They took a position of defiance, even of subversion, against what we normally think of as "the real world", the world that so dominates today. In today's verse, we see Rumi being the good gnostic that he was, gently poking fun at the unreal "real world" that threatens us with unfulfilled longing, with unquenched thirst, and with the inevitable decay of the body in death. If we can but "wake up" and see through the lie, then we will have nothing to fear.

I know I'm not "there" yet. I know that fear still holds sway with me. These things take time to ripen and this fruit is not yet ready to drop.