Only Listen

We fill constantly God's ears with words,
but don't give him a chance to speak.

Be still.

We need God more than God needs us--
be still, and listen to the blessings
all around you.

Do not shout at some distant being--
God is all around you-- you must only recognize it.
Breathe him in.

Your ramblings mean nothing to the divine--
he can read your heart.
Why is it that you ramble?
For God?
For others?

Or for you?

As Elijah knows,
God is not in the fire,
or the earthquake,

but in the whisper.

Sew up your lips--
only listen.

God is a Tree, the Wine, and I am a Fire

Today I am drunk with the love of God-
my cup was filled to the brim.

I embraced the divine, in actual,
and there I spent the sunset.

How can words describe this?
It was the ecstasy of silence-
ineffable.

God's branches fit perfectly around me,
and I felt love.

I need not build a ladder, like Jacob, to the heavens-
I found it growing from the ground.

Its leaves dropped around me like
quiet petals of grace
nourishing my soul like rain to the ground.
I drink up the flood.

When I taste the wine of God,
it fills me in music,
intoxicating warmth of heaven,

light of life.

How is it that one small candle flame
can fill a room?

How is it that my small heart
can fit God's great love?

I lift my hands to heaven-
flames shoot forth from fingers ten.
I'm becoming fire again.

A Thirsty Fish

I don't get tired of you. Don't grow weary
of being compassionate toward me!

All this thirst equipment
must surely be tired of me,
the waterjar, the water carrier.

I have a thirsty fish in me
that can never find enough
of what it's thirsty for!

Show me the way to the ocean!
Break these half-measures,
these small containers.

All this fantasy
and grief.

Let my house be drowned in the wave
that rose last night out of the courtyard
hidden in the center of my chest.

Joseph fell like the moon into my well.
The harvest I expected was washed away.
But no matter.

A fire has risen above my tombstone hat.
I don't want learning, or dignity,
or respectability.

I want this music and this dawn
and the warmth of your cheek against mine.

The grief-armies assemble,
but I'm not going with them.

This is how it always is
when I finish a poem.

A great silence overcomes me,
and I wonder why I ever thought
to use language.

-Jelaluddin Rumi

Sacred Space

So often I come to you quietly
and say nothing.
We sit silently in the aura of infinity
and dissolution,
somewhere in between truth and despair
(or perhaps they are two sides of the same leaf,
fallen gently from the tree of Being).
So rather, in some part of one vast ocean,
where everything is mixed together--

I'd like to think that the truth is something good,
that won't leave me wanting.
For when I sit with you,
I am deprived of nothing.

This space is sacred.

I rest with you in a cloud, a whirlwind--
the eye of the storm, where the messiness of reality
and peace
are one.