Your earthy lover
can be charming and coquettish
but never very faithful.

The true lover is the one
who on your final day
opens a thousand doors.


Longing, desire and an uncompromising intoxication for life - these were the themes of the thirteenth century mystic and poet, Jelaluddin Rumi, one of the most interesting, radical and enlightened poets of all time.

Born in 1207 in the region today known as Afghanistan, Rumi was the son of a group of wandering disciples and lived the majority of his life in the Sultanate of Rum (and thus the name 'Rumi', a descriptive name meaning 'Roman', or a resident of Rum). Fom an early age, he was recognized as possessing 'immense spiritual eminence' and headed a religious school at the age of twenty-five.

It was only upon meeting the dervish Shams of Tabriz that his life was to change completely.

Lovers don't finally meet somewhere
They're in each other all along.

Shams, himself of a wandering spiitual ilk, had been roaming the middle east praying for one who could 'endure his company' when a voice from the wildreness responded "And what will you give'?

?My head!' exclaimed Shams. 'Then the one that you seek is Jal-a-ludin of Konya,' responded the mysterious invisible.

And thus, Shams made way to Konya where he happened upon Rumi. At once, the two men were immediately drawn to the other and nearly inseperable until fate intervened a scant two weeks after their introduction when Shams was called to a back door, went out and was never seen again.

It was believed that he was murdered under the connivance of Rumi's son, which if true, proved an unfortunate fulfillment of the earlier promise of his head.

Rumi was devastated. But it was notably through the turning point of this loss and bereavement that Rumi found solace in the quill writing tomes of poetry dedicated to his beloved friend and eventually simply surrendering timelessly to the passion that he inspired, transcending from the loss of the temporal into the communion of eternity. To read Rumi's work without the element of the divine is to render a great dissservice to the work itself, for Shams merely became the symbol and archetype of divine and sacred love through human connection. If then there is anything at all to gather from Rumi's work, it is the power of the spirit to sublimate its own anguish by rising above the base nature of hatred and powerlessness in the face of pain and adversity.

To read Rumi is to witness the actualized potential of the power of Love through the intoxication of the Spirit, producing ecstatic bliss through the purification of grief.

It is to read between all of the frail lines of duality beyond death and violence into a love that encompasses only the ecstatic bliss of the Whole.

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field.

I will meet you there.”


For further reading:

Essential Rumi - translations by Coleman Banks (1997);'Jälkisanat' by Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila, in Mawlaana Rumi: Rakkaus on musta leijona, trans. by Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila (2002); Rumi by Franklin D. Lewis (2000); The Illuminated Rumi - Further translations by Coleman Barks (1997); Rumi's World by Annemarie Schimmel (1992); Baha-i Walad: Grundzüge seines Lebens und seiner Mystik by Fritz Meier (1989); The Sufi Path of Love -William Chittick(1975); The Life and Work of Muhammad Jalal ud-Din Rumi by Afsal Iqbal (1974).


Lisbeth Cheever-Gessaman