a fresh basket of bread.
A Fresh Basket of Bread
by Rumi
The mystery of spiritual emptiness
may be living in a pilgrim’s heart, and yet
the knowing of it may not be his.
Wait for the illuminating openness,
as though your chest were filling with Light,
as when God said,
Did we not expand you?
Don’t look for it outside yourself.
You are the source of milk. Don’t milk others!
There is a milk-fountain inside you.
Don’t walk around with an empty bucket.
You have a channel into the Ocean, and yet
you ask for water from a little pool.
Beg for that love-expansion. Meditate only on THAT.
There is a basket of fresh bread on your head,
and yet you go door to door asking for crusts.
Knock on your inner door. No other.
Sloshing kneedeep in fresh riverwater, yet
you keep wanting a drink from other people’s water bags.
Water is everywhere around you, but you only see
barriers that keep you from water.
Mad with thirst, he can’t drink from the stream
running so close by his face. He’s like a pearl
on the deep bottom, wondering, inside his shell,
“Where’s the Ocean?”
Your mental questionings form the barrier.
Your physical eyesight bandages your knowing.
Self-consciousness plugs your ears.
Stay bewildered in God, and only that.
Those of you who are scattered, simplify your
worrying lives. There is one righteousness:
Water the fruit trees, and not the thorns.
Be generous to what nurtures the Spirit and God’s
luminous reason-light. Don’t honor what causes
dysentery and knotted-up tumors.
Don’t feed both sides of yourself equally.
The spirit and the body carry different loads
and require different attentions.
Too often we put saddlebags on Jesus and let
the donkey run loose in the pasture.
Don’t make the body do what the spirit does
best, and don’t put a big load on the spirit that the
body could carry easily.
