Texting $10 to the Red Cross and watching hundreds of thousands without food
Taking lunch to a friend and feeling helpless to ease the pain
Talking to my children and having them pretend they are not listening
Trying to speak truth to power and still having security threatening the peace
Feeling like actions thoughts and words have no hope of affecting change
Except for the shift I sense within
This is Rumi's "Zero Circle." I thought you'd enjoy...
ReplyDeleteBe helpless, dumbfounded,
Unable to say yes or no.
Then a stretcher will come from grace to gather us up.
We are too dull-eyed to see that beauty.
If we say we can, we're lying.
If we say No, we don't see it,
That No will behead us
And shut tight our window onto spirit.
So let us rather no be sure of anything,
Beside ourselves, and only that, so
Miraculous beings come running to help.
Crazed, lying in a zero circle, mute,
We shall be saying finally,
With tremendous eloquence, Lead us.
When we have totally surrendered to that beauty,
We shall be a mighty kindness.
Roger Housden in his "ten poems to change your life" made an observation about this poem, which I think is true: "Rumi is urging us...to be willing to stand there with our jaw dropped open, dumbfounded and helpless before the immensity, the impossibility of our lives....We don't want to be susceptible to unknown, unsuspected circumstances that can blow in at any moment from any angle. Except that we are, and we know we are--all the time--which is why we hang on so tightly. We stay busy, we keep out focus narrow and the windows shut."
It's all about not-knowing, I think. Not-knowing who we'll affect for good. Not-knowing what good we're doing. Then we'll only take credit for it! LOL.
xo
Thank you for this Elissa - I needed it tonight.
ReplyDeleteYou're welcome, my friend. I need it, too. Constantly. xo
ReplyDelete