From The Essential Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks. New York: HarperCollins, 1995, p. 260.
Birdwings
Your grief for what you’ve lost lifts a mirror
up to where you’re bravely working.
Expecting the worst, you look, and instead,
here’s the joyful face you’ve been wanting to see.
Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes.
If it were always a fist or always stretched open,
you would be paralyzed.
Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding,
the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated
as birdwings.
2 comments:
Our culture encourages us to be always open and available, our cellphones always on, our lives spread out on Facebook pages. But we need time to nourish ourselves spiritually in silence and solitude. We also need to decide where to put our energy. If we give whenever we are asked, we may find that we have no energy left when we really need it. We might need to protect ourselves from situations in which we may be harmed by exposing our vulnerability. So we need to balance the moments when we are open and when we are closed, as this poem so beautifully expresses.
Loving God, help me to open joyfully when it is time to share myself, and to close myself around your nourishing presence when it is time to protect and restore myself.
Rumi captures so magnificently the surprise of life. Thank you, Godess, for surprise, joy and even grief, though I never want it, yet it comes.
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