Rumi-nations

I'm reading a novel in which a woman reads a novel based on the meeting of Shams of Tabriz and Rumi. Each time I see Rumi's name I am filled with warmth. I can't help but instantly remember longing for the passion about which he writes. I first read Rumi as a Sophomore or Freshman in college. It was an honors seminar entitled "Sacred Meanings." The 6 or 7 of us read works from different religious scholars including Martin Buber, Thomas Merton, and non-traditional scholars like Meinrad Craighead. The Coleman Barks collection entitled Like This was my introduction to the Sufi mystic Rumi.

I had never been in love at this point in my life. I had never understood a passion that would allow oneself to forget oneself. These poems of spiritual passion and longing touched a river inside me that I didn't yet know about. While it would be years before I would abandon myself to that river, I understood the spiritual longing of which Rumi wrote. Well, I understood that there was something missing from my life and that the world around me could be beautiful even if I didn't often see it as such.

I had read some Emerson and Thoreau. I had experienced the Divine in nature. While at times the woods in which I secluded myself as a teenager were isolating and lonely, I had witnessed stillness and connection. Not the ecstatic joy that Rumi sings of instead I encountered a profound quiet. To sit for hours beside a pond, partially engulfed by woods and bordered by fields, I could use all my senses to experience what was going on around me.

While it's difficult to talk about because I know it sounds odd to most people, I had my first spiritual vision there. Laying in the tall, dry grass, looking up at an empty sky, I saw myself as a bird traveling overhead. Then I was the air around the bird - literally the particles of air surrounding the bird. I felt the caress of the feathers, I felt the weight of her wings and my own connection to her. Then I felt my pressure against the surface of the pond and the solidity of the water below me. I felt it pressing back. I became the surface of the water and I could see the body of water below me and the air above me. I could feel the air move across me and the tension of the elements that held me together. This vision went on this way until I was the mud beneath the pond with the fishes and worms and turtles above me, through me.

It was an exquisite experience that I wasn't to share with anyone. It was a little gift I carried around inside me, not truly aware that it was a vision, a glimpse at what I would continue to define as God. I could not articulate this at the time. Partly because I knew most of my friends would either think it blasphemous or they couldn't connect with God this way. To them, well and to me at the time, God was a patriarchal concept that I could not accept and have turned away from. In fact, it has been decades since I've even been able to embrace the word God because I define it so differently than many people. I do not like to use the word. It is so limiting. It invokes a shared image that does not reflect what I want to communicate. I think God is something one can only experience and is far too complex to be captured in a word. God is experience, a verb or adverb.

It is interesting this thread that has run through the course of my life. This interest in that quiet chaos of love, passion, commitment, fellowship, endurance and solitude that is life. I am just now beginning to see that I am walking a path. I am not wandering aimlessly. I have always been on a path. It is in the weaving together of these memories into stories that illuminate that path for me. Each step I take is in concert with the steps I have already taken.