Rumi's poems have for more years than I can remember been sources of inspiration and guidance in nourishing the crafts of life and offering inspiration and guidance in how to live it more fully, more closely to what I have come to know as sacred. Naturally over the years I have been drawn to others who have found similar companionship in Rumi. Seldom, though, has that experience come as richly and from more than one source at once. I feel blessed that such is now one of those instances.
The first is a book given to me by a friend. Carol Saysette brought it yesterday to my door, saying she had helped modestly in the book's publication, and so purchased a few copies for her own friends. I only glancingly know its author, but the book is entitled Julie Taylor's Best Loved Poems. Julie Taylor's life and my own have drawn nearer to one another because we have been grateful fellow members of the Community Congregational Church on the top of Rock Hill Road in Tiburon, California. I didn't know until I began reading Julie's best loved poems that in her preface she gathered the poems partly in thanks to her friends in that church, "who have been so supportive in my lifetime challenge, living with Parkinson's Disease."
Accompanying that acknowledgement and a photo of Julie taken some years ago, are these prefatory lines from an essay of Mary Oliver: "Poetry is a life-cherishing force. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry. Yes indeed."
The second source is a dear friend and fellow member of the community in which I have made my own home for the last nearly eight years. I came to know life in community only in those years, my eighth decade; but that is another story.
The friend of whom I speak is Al Braidwood, also a member of that same Community Congregational Church, but whom I've come to know more as a fellow resident of The Redwoods, the living place he and I have known since arriving here at roughly the same time. Al and I gather frequently, sometimes with others, sometimes just with each other, to enjoy and learn from each other's company. This morning Al wrote to me and some of our other close friends,
"Rumi," Al wrote, "is a 13th century Persian poet with a prophetic cast of mind. He dresses experiences with words. He makes it easier for us to understand matters of the heart, the mind, and the soul. Some people underestimate spirituality or see it as a trend, but as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said: 'We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. Actually, we are spiritual beings having a human experience.' Rumi explores that truth in his poems. We don’t just live in the spiritual realm, but we are the spiritual realm."
Since Al is the more recent source I evoke, and because the poem he offered today is one with which I have lived most gratefully, I will begin this small collection with the Rumi poem that has affected me most deeply: