BardBliss: Selections from Rumi for a Friend

This shot of glowing seed heads was totally
ruined by the neighbor's truck! Aarrgghh.
But I still like it.

Request: A dear friend of ours, Ken, was to have brain surgery yesterday morning and it got postponed. The surgeon hopes to do it today. Please send him your good and life-supporting energy; he could use it. (If you want to really focus, we are in Erie, Pennsylvania.) Thank you.

If reasonable people don't feel the presence of love
within the universe, that doesn't mean it's not there.


Don't talk long to skeptics or to those
who claim to be atheists.


The body is a device to calculate
the astronomy of the spirit.
Look through that astrolabe
and become oceanic.


Lo, I am with you always means when you look for God,
God is in the look of your eyes,
in the thought of looking, nearer to you than your self,
or things that have happened to you
There's no need to go outside.

Be melting snow.
Wash yourself of yourself.


Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes.
If it were always a fist or always stretched open,
you would be paralyzed.

Your deepest presence is in every small contracting
and expanding,
the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated
as birdwings.


Stop the words now.
Open the window in the center of your chest,
and let the spirits fly in and out.