BardBliss: Rumi & Freedom from Habit

Spiderwort out back.

Listening to: Some Persian folk music made modern.

Today's Bliss Formula: A windy, gray day, threatening to rain. I will appreciate the rain for the ground and the plants and not get stressed about the wee drip we got last night. We have lived in this house for over nine years and not once had a single problem. I will give up the habit of over-reaction and instead remain in gratitude.

From The Essential Rumi
Translations by Coleman Barks
with John Moyne

It's a habit of yours to walk slowly.
You hold a grudge for years.
With such heaviness, how can you be modest?
With such attachments, do you expect to arrive anywhere?

Be wide as the air to learn a secret.
Right now you're equal portions clay
and water, thick mud.

Abraham learned how the sun and moon and the stars all set.
He said, No longer will I try to assign partners for God.

You are so weak. Give up to grace.
The ocean takes care of each wave
till it gets to shore.
You need more help than you know.
You're trying to live your life in open scaffolding.
Say Bismillah, In the name of God,
as the priest does with a knife when he offers an animal.

Bismillah your old self
to find your real name.


Do you know your real name? Are you living from habit and not spontaneous reaction and joy? What comfort is holding you back from the life you could be living?

EverydayBliss: Resisting What Makes Us Happy

After sitting outside to journal.

Listening to right now: The Early Music Show, BBC Radio 3

Today's Happiness Formula: A great response yesterday to the first interview! More to come...

Following My Bliss By: Working on my partner's manuscript today; I will finish those corrections! Yes, I will.

Over the past year, I have been consumed by the needs of sick animals and I felt like I had a good day if I managed to journal. First, our sweet orange tabby, Ernie (age 13), passed away -- quite suddenly April 2007 -- and then our angel black and white Jobie (age 16) became ill and passed away, at home, in my arms, this January.

We felt blessed to have so much time with them -- and at the end, we were able to focus on them in the way that most humans can only wish for.

Though we are still in mourning, we are slowly and surely making our way to our "new normal," as grief therapists seem to like to call it.

And that includes getting back to our creative endeavors, which for me is a very thick, in-need-of-serious-revision manuscript, sitting patiently in a cabinet a few feet from me.

To get back to my own writing, I am doing two things. First, I am helping my partner revise her novel. This is a good way to for me to get back to working with words and not feel so attached.

Second, I am blogging, which has been a surprisingly effective way to strengthen my very weak writing muscles -- the muscles that need to be worked every single day.

Every single day.

This is hard for me.

I am, by nature, a routine cat. But my most consistent routine is the resistance of this fact about myself.

I have talked to many people about this: why do we resist doing the very things that we know and claim are good for us?

When I am writing, the "I" in that phrase gets lost. "I" feel immersed in something larger, timeless, full.

This happens at other times: when I do yoga, when I am weeding or dead-heading in the garden, when I am reading some very excellent book, when I am bird-watching.

When I am truly present to these activities, "I" feel immense. At moments like these, I know I am experiencing empirical evidence that "I" am not "it."

But given the choice, how many of us would avoid our own small lists of self-fulfilling, self-expanding, most-loved endeavors in favor of ... cleaning the house, saying "yes" to an event we have no desire to go to, watching TV... anything to avoid the very things that make us who we are.

Obviously, someone like Kal Barteski does not have this problem. Or at least, does not have this problem to the extent that the rest of us do. She has learned how to move past the hesitation (as Sakyong Mipham would label it); she has learned not to mistake that transparent, temporary feeling for her truth.

Be courageous and discipline yourself.
Work. Keep digging your well.
Don't think about getting off from work.
Water is there somewhere.
Submit to a daily practice.
Your loyalty to that
is a ring on the door.
Keep knocking, and the joy inside
will eventually open a window
and look out to see who's there.

--Rumi (Trans. Coleman Barks)

This is a Rumi that we should all read every day, every morning. It could easily be turned into a personal prayer, mantra, affirmation (whichever term floats your boat).

It is so simple yet so difficult, isn't it?

But the key is to do it anyway. That key will open the door to your bliss, your never-ending well of joy and fulfillment -- the magic elixir, if you will, that will enable you to live through anything, even your "worst" things, as I have learned over the past year.

Jobie, in particular, was the first being to teach me about unconditional love -- the giving and the receiving. I met Jobie before I met my partner, and I think he prepared me for her. (She came along two years later.) My heart felt broken before I met Jobie and he started the healing process. I thought I was an angry person and he showed me I was just sad. Sad can be mended.

So when I would imagine not having him, it seemed like the worst thing that could ever happen to me. But his teachings were deep and far and wide, and his love opened my heart which opened my life.

By the time he became ill, he'd spent 16 years teaching me -- with the eventual help of others, of course! By the time he passed in my arms, by the time I felt that last breath leave his little body, I was ready for the next level of lessons.

And so I write, every day, and I do yoga, and I weed the gardens. And I don't resist like I used to.

Because the resistance, I have learned from that wise cat, is a "no" to life.

That resistance is no hope, no trust, no belief.

And once our hearts open and the hope and trust and belief and "yes" are allowed to rush in, the resistance is washed away in the flood of who you really are, a flood of what you are truly capable of, the flood of your infinite power.

I say "yes" to it all now -- to the joy and the fun and the laughs and also to the grief and the tears -- because it is all one and the same.

QuoteBliss: Rumi

Let yourself
be silently drawn
by the stronger pull
of what
you really
love.

--Rumi (trans. Coleman Barks)