Rumi's Song of the Reed

Being from the U.S. and being a good liberal, I am used to listening to National Public Radio. Luckily, us U.S. ex-pats and other NPR fans can hear most NPR programs online these days, no matter where you are. One of my favorite NPR shows is a show called Speaking of Faith--a very well done, cosmopolitan, pluralistic, but just-Judeo-Christian-enough-to-make-it-believable-hour of discussion on "faith, meaning and values" (as I believe they put it). This week's show was a repeat of a show I heard earlier in the year on the 13th century Persian Sufi theologian and poet (he was also a jurist) Jalaladin Rumi. What a coincidence, you might say, since I have been talking about Rumi in the last couple of posts! No, I say, there are no coincidences. Rumi has appeared in my life and will reappear on this blog site today for a reason. Here's the reason.

The Rumi "poem" (azul, actually, sometimes translated as "ode") I will put here today is called "The Song of the Reed." It speaks to me now especially eloquently because I happen to be going through a period of very confusing heartbreak. An old friend who I was in love with earlier in the year finds it no longer possible, at least at the present time, to talk to me. There are not many salves for these wounds. But interestingly, in this poem Rumi talks about how longing and the ability to love, even when these feelings are not returned, can be a kind of medication for the soul when seen in the right "light." He calls the reed song "hurt and salve combining."

Anyone who has gone through such times, and this is most of us, reaches a layer of clarity when we realize we should "give ourselves a break" because, as it runs in my head, "at least we had the guts to put ourselves out there," as it were, regardless of what happend in response. How the "song of the reed" can be "intimacy and longing in one song,"as Rumi puts it, or rather how our heartbreak can become a "song of the reed," is apparent to me when we reach a second layer of clarity about how the ability to love comes from our own ability to reflect divinity, divine qualities and divine love (sorry for the theism here, but hey, it's my blog and Rumi was a medieval Muslim). The ability to love and feel love has, in my view at least, something to do with manifesting and recognizing universal qualities within ourselves and our social behavior, and not with manifesting and recognizing qualities known ONLY to our lovers.

A corrolary, hopefully, to this is that at some point in the healing process we realize that the things we thought and felt with our loved ones are real, and just as real with them as without the lover. It is at this point, in my view, that we begin to learn about the designs God has for us and learn that these designs are made just as apparent in cases of love being given and not returned as in cases of it being returned by another human. This is one way, for me at least, that unrequited love becomes the Song of the Reed.

But don't let me stop you from reading the poem itself and finding other ways. There is much packed into a Rumi poem, which is the reason he's been read and re-read constantly since the days of Aquinas and St. Francis, two more important teachers of how and why we need to love, need to love loudly and proudly, but also need to do it observantly, very observantly. On a related but scholarly (read "geeky") note, for those who know Aquinas and Christian Platonism, there is a bit of Platonic "remembrance" going on in this poem too that would make a wonderful basis for trying to compare the two contemporary thinkers. I also really like how Rumi refers to us lovers as "fish" in a sea, as surrounded by grace as fish are water, yet unaware of it. To this little piscean believer in the law of attraction, this is powerful stuff.


The Song of the Reed

Since I was cut from the reedbed, I have made this crying sound. Anyone apart from someone he loves understands what I say. Anyone pulled from a source longs to go back.

At any gathering I am there, mingling in the laughing and grieving, a friend to each, but few will hear the secrets hidden within the notes. No ears for that. Body flowing out of spirit, spirit up from body: no concealing that mixing. It's not given us to see the soul.

The reed flute is fire, not wind. Be that empty. Hear the love fire tangled in the reed notes, as bewilderment melts into wine. The reed is a friend to all who want the fabric torn and drawn away. The reed is hurt and salve combining. Intimacy and longing for intimacy, one song. A disastrous surrender and a fine love, together.

The one who secretly hears this is senseless. A tongue has one customer, the ear. A sugarcane flute has such effect because it was able to make sugar in the reedbed. The sound it makes is for everyone.

Days full of wanting, let them go by without worrying that they do. Stay where you are inside such a pure, hollow note. Every thirst gets satisfied except that of these fish, the mystics, who swim a vast ocean of grace still somehow longing for it! No one lives in that without being nourished every day.

But if someone doesn't want to hear the song of the reed flute, it's best to cut conversation short, say good-bye, and leave.